Fresh out of high school on her first movie set, Lauren Ambrose saw legends everywhere she looked. In the 1997 queer studio comedy In & Out, she portrayed a student of Kevin Kline’s high-school English teacher, whose parents were played by Debbie Reynolds and Wilford Brimley; she observed Bob Newhart and Tom Selleck and Joan Cusack all at work too. She remembers Reynolds most vividly, though, grabbing a stage mic one day when cameras weren’t rolling and performing “Tammy” and “Singin’ in the Rain” for all to see, improvising a few pratfalls along the way. On another day, Reynolds approached Ambrose as if she were talking to a know-nothing preteen. (“I looked like I was 12,” Ambrose concedes.) “I’m Princess Leia’s mother,” she boasted; “I know,” Ambrose replied. This was Hollywood—huge stars being their biggest, most ridiculously famous selves. “I was just like—this is the best,” Ambrose recalls now. “It was showbiz!”

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An innocence still radiates through the way Ambrose talks about her profession. She gets that twinkle in her eye every time she’s lost in a memory, that sensation of being surrounded by the greats and absorbing every drop of greatness they leave behind. It’s appealing, and even a little surprising, since like most of her peers Ambrose has experienced her ups and downs. She has forged her own path, in the mold of actors she idolized coming of age in the industry, however bumpy the ride. “It’s all in a life,” she says, her vision of a scrappy, diverse career very much still in progress. “I want to be that old, tiny actor-person who can play very different parts.”

It’s hard to avoid doing the same thing twice, but as Ambrose Zooms in from her home on the East Coast, newly returned from a press tour in Los Angeles, she makes her case for having pulled it off. Her latest role, as Van in Yellowjackets’ second season, is starkly internal, a woman shaped by profound adolescent trauma and unwilling to examine it. The performance is quiet and mysterious and deeply still. It took some time to realize I’d never seen Ambrose like that before. She’d just completed her run as an unraveling perfectionist in M. Night Shyamalan’s Servant and, before that, excelled on Broadway in the brutally demanding role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady. This is also the actor who made her name as an angsty wonder on Six Feet Under, the emotional fireball of Claire Fisher. She’s never really been one to hold it in. On that series, co-star Rachel Griffiths once said to Ambrose, “You’re able to be very angry,” to which Ambrose offered a confused “thank you.” “I wasn’t sure what it meant,” she says.

Over an hour-plus conversation, Ambrose repeatedly emphasizes her current professional and artistic satisfaction, while always quick to qualify that it’s not as if she was unsatisfied beforehand. “I hope I gave you something to write about,” she’ll say when we wrap up. She’s said a version of this to journalists before. What’s that about, exactly? Perhaps the awareness that the journey from job to job can feel random, instinctual, tedious—that any working actor’s life comes without a clean narrative. Ambrose certainly presents that. But she loves the real thing—and she tells it like a story worth telling.

Let’s start with this tech setup. Ambrose is laughing as she logs on a few minutes late. “It always takes me longer than I think it will to figure out how to do an interview that revolves around technology,” she says. As in…Zoom? Yes: “You should see this. People have ways of doing these things. I have a phone stuck on an absurd set of books.” A few minutes later, she’ll stop herself mid-answer to reconnect her charger, leaving and re-entering our meeting window. She grins knowingly through it all, clear that most actors of her profile and demographic have probably got this pandemic-induced routine down by now.

But Ambrose doesn’t do these sorts of interviews very often. In fact, aside from her actual job, she doesn’t do anything associated with Hollywood very often. Her Yellowjackets-spurned LA trips have brought her back to the place she’s barely visited since moving away in the mid-2000s. “Just driving around is like, Wow, I remember that building, I remember trying to figure out how to park in that studio—whatever it was when I was 20,” she says. Ambrose has made a conscious choice to live “out in the woods” with her husband and two kids—she’d rather not tell the world precisely where—and to commute as necessary. “I don’t think it’s helpful to me to be surrounded by the industry of show business all the time,” she says. “It’s important to be away from it because, yeah—there’s a darkness that comes over one when they’re in it too much.” 

It’s reasonable to wonder whether Ambrose is referring to how she got started onscreen—besides In & Out, she skirted the edges of the late-’90s teen scene, joining Party of Five for its final season and leading the ensemble cast of cult hit Can’t Hardly Wait opposite Jennifer Love Hewitt and Seth Green. (Jason Segel, Clea DuVall, Jaime Pressly, Selma Blair, and many more also appeared in tiny roles in the film, pre-fame.) But no, Ambrose never felt herself getting sucked in, instead staying in her New Haven hometown. “I think because I came in from Connecticut to do it—I didn’t really live there,” she says. “I’ve always felt outside of all of it, on some level, and like I’ve always been proving myself at every level.”

A few years later, when Ambrose got Six Feet Under, playing the teen daughter of a funeral-home operator in California, she became a bit more enmeshed. The HBO family saga came with a pedigree in newly minted Oscar winner Alan Ball (American Beauty), and went on to win the Golden Globe for best drama series and earn Ambrose two Emmy nominations for best supporting actress. Once again she was the youngest cast member, with another chance to play sponge and soak up everything around her. She watched Frances Conroy nail take after take of a wrenching scene from the pilot, in which her matriarch Ruth Fisher weeps over her husband’s grave. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” Ambrose says. She worked up the nerve to ask Conroy how she did it, and Conroy said, “Everybody has their moment to do their work—when they say action, that’s my time to do my work.” That’s now a guiding principle for Ambrose’s career. 

Ball found Ambrose “brave,” willing to try anything and dig deep into Six Feet Under’s intensely emotional material. Over five seasons, he charted her coming of age in the show, the strength she brought to Claire’s growth as an artist and within the family. He ultimately structured the brilliant and devastating finale around her, following Claire down the road as she said goodbye to her family, one by one. “The last day we shot, she cried at the end,” Ball says. As Ambrose remembers it, “The character got in the car and went off on her adventures, and that’s literally what I did. It was so transparent for me that I was really living it and really saying goodbye—and leaving California.”

Ambrose left Hollywood as soon as she didn’t have a job to keep her there. “To go directly from Six Feet Under into doing a bunch of plays was, maybe, a weird move,” she says. “But the whole reason I wanted to do this was to be onstage.”

In middle school, Ambrose auditioned for an off-Broadway play at the Vineyard Theatre company and eventually booked it. She played a bratty sister; her parents took her back and forth for rehearsals and performances. “It was this intense exploration of big emotions—big, intense emotions,” she says. “Here I was in Union Square with all these actors who were trying to make it.” There’s the root, perhaps, of that now-familiar feeling Ambrose gets so often, of being surrounded by something bigger: “I was like, This is unbelievable.”

She stayed focused on school until turning 18, and weighed going to a music conservatory—she’d done sessions at the Tanglewood summer academy in New England, and before that, appeared on the TV singing competition Star Search at 11 years old. But after In & Out, other big-screen roles, and then many years of Six Feet Under, she never really got to make a go of it. So she gave herself the chance. Ambrose wonders now how it seemed: “I’m sure my agents were like, ‘What has happened? Why are you doing that?’” She turned down big offers, like a key part in Twilight, because theater required months to be blocked out. She balanced stage work with pilots that didn’t get picked up, or a few that did and only lasted a few episodes, like Amy Sherman-Palladino’s The Return of Jezebel James. For all the promise of exiting a mega-hit like Six Feet Under, Ambrose’s screen career appeared stalled. 

“It’s all in a life,” she says again. “I’m sure I made poor choices.”

But she broke out in a different way. Almost immediately after moving to New York, she joined the Broadway revival of Awake and Sing!, directed by multi-Tony-winner Bartlett Sher. “She was so good,” Sher tells me. “She’s one of those few people who manifests as an artist all the greatest possible layers of human experience.” She won a Drama Desk Award as part of an ensemble that also included Mark Ruffalo. The next two years, she did back-to-back productions of Shakespeare in the Park, including a Romeo and Juliet that many critics consider an all-timer (The New York Times called her performance “a Juliet truly to die for”). The year after that, she returned to Broadway in an Exit the King toplined by Geoffrey Rush and Susan Sarandon. For an actor who had no reputation in New York theater, it’s a rather staggering list of consistent credits—and a pretty remarkable commitment.

All this amid a major life change: Ambrose, who married the filmmaker Sam Handel around her casting in Six Feet Under in 2001, gave birth to their son during this period, and found herself overpowered by feelings of love and longing and fulfillment. It all went into the work; she spoke to Oscar Isaac’s Romeo as if to her newborn. I remind her of what Griffiths observed about her back on Six Feet Under. “Yeah. Finally, somewhere to put it,” she says in recognition. “I was definitely like that. I still am.” 

I ask about the “weird move” phrasing Ambrose used to describe leaving LA. “Seemed like a good idea at the time—the Lauren Ambrose story,” she quips back. So what does she consider her weirdest career move? She deflects for a bit, then yells out to her husband. “Can you think of the weirdest choice I’ve ever made?” she asks, looking away from her webcam. “Marrying me?” I overhear. “What?” she asks. “Marrying me?” he says louder. She looks back into the webcam with a smirk: “My husband says, ‘Marrying me.’” Back on track: They can’t come up with any answer, eventually saying almost in unison, “They’ve all made some sense.” 

The boldest move of all may be the one that never happened. About a decade ago Ambrose was set to lead a revival of Funny Girl, despite never having done a professional musical. The vocal requirements of the role are, you may have heard, significant—perhaps career-defining. Sher was slated to mount the production, which was ultimately canceled due to financing struggles. Ambrose tells me the Funny Girl book had been more riskily adapted for their adaptation. “We really were going to sink into the world of vaudeville, Lower East Side New York, and the Yiddish theater,” she says. “[Compared to] the one that’s on Broadway now, I think it would’ve been a very different experience…. But these things come and go. You can’t be too devastated.”

It may sting a little less now that she’s proven just how assuredly she can carry a major Broadway musical. Sher cast Ambrose as Eliza in his 2018 My Fair Lady, after she sent him a note asking for a shot at an audition. The acclaimed revival won Ambrose the Outer Critics Circle Award and earned her a Tony nomination. Her performance was mesmerizing, and the singing? Call it a massive re-introduction. “You’re going from a growling, furious working-class girl working in a flower market to a princess at the end of the piece—you need an incredible singer who both belts and sings gorgeous high soprano,” Sher says of the part. “She could do all of it and bring a level of acting and heart and intelligence and ferocity.”

He adds, “I just don’t know what she can’t do.”

With My Fair Lady, Ambrose naturally sparked a lot of media coverage—including one curious controversy. Co-star Diana Rigg criticized Ambrose for not performing on Sunday matinees, a decision that was not actually Ambrose’s, and the sentiment caught fire, with outlets like the New York Post speculating about Ambrose’s life “up in the country” taking up her time. In reality, says Sher, “[Eliza] is an absolute voice-killing character, and it was always planned from the very beginning to move from eight shows down to seven to protect your instrument.” Ambrose says she didn’t understand exactly why it became headline fodder, and shrugs it off now as nothing that bothered her. “I don’t look at the internet for the most part, except for the New York Times Cooking,” she says. “But every single actor, every single member of the ensemble—I was just astounded by their stamina and artistry at every turn.”

There are a few instances as we chat in which Ambrose takes back a detail, nervous about what the public’s reaction might be. She’s warm, empathetic, and progressive in conversation but fears how certain things might be misconstrued, however appropriate they are in context. “I don’t want anyone to get mad at me,” she says at one point. The reluctance doesn’t feel controlling but like an earnest desire to, in a sense, get it right—and not let outside noise define her for others. She wants to be judged by her work; oftentimes, as the artist on the outside looking in, the work is all she’s had. “I feel like I always have to go that extra step to get the jobs that are truly different from anything I’ve ever done before, because no one’s seen it,” she says. “But that’s what I love. For me, that’s no problem. I’m happy to completely transform myself. Piece of cake. I relish that kind of challenge.”

She has done this on a much bigger platform in the last five years, pulling off completely different, widely seen firsts between Broadway musicals, Shyamalan horror, and the subtle terror of Yellowjackets. A rare thing happened for Ambrose on that latter project; she was practically cast in advance, as both fans and the existing ensemble crossed their fingers for Ambrose to step into the adult version of Van, who’s played as a teenager in the past timeline by Liv Hewson. “She was the front-runner for all of us as soon as we knew that there was going to be an adult Van,” says Tawny Cypress, who plays Taissa and shares the most scenes with Ambrose in Yellowjackets. “I was praying that she would get the job.”

The rest of the core adult cast—namely Christina Ricci, Melanie Lynskey, and Juliette Lewis—were also teen stars thrust into similarly varying acting careers, marked by industry biases and steadied by their undeniable talent. Ambrose joining that company, at this stage of her life, has been meaningful. “I’ve never had the opportunity to be on a show with all of these women my own age,” she says. She tells the younger cast members to savor this moment, speaking from experience, and trades stories about the decades of collective experience in the Yellowjackets green room. “It feels very landing,” Ambrose says. “These [characters] have all survived this trauma together in the wilderness, and indeed, we survived like 20,000 years of show business together and are in that green room to talk about it.”

The end of the sixth episode teases the reckoning between these women to come, as after spending the second season’s first half in their own stories, the adult Yellowjackets tenuously reunite, prepared to hash out all the long-buried stuff. “It was the first day that we were all together on set,” Ambrose says. As the newbie, she was ready. She loves having somewhere to put all that emotion, remember—and here finally got to place all of those rich green-room conversations, those fast-developing bonds, into the juicy work. She stops herself from spoiling anything, in true Yellowjackets fashion. 

Cypress tells me Ambrose was nervous when she first arrived at the Yellowjackets set in Vancouver. The returning cast was surprised by this; to them, Ambrose was a rock star headliner. “She just didn’t want to fuck it up,” Cypress says. “She would say, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know if this is right.’” Ambrose saw herself, Cypress continues, as an outsider. 

Ah, yes. An identity Ambrose knows all too well. It’s the story, in many ways, of her life as an actor—the one she told over the course of our interview in winding, complex, self-effacing detail before wondering whether she’d given me anything to work with at all. It’s a story, she’ll tell you, of proving yourself. Yes, Lauren Ambrose can do Broadway. Yes, she can sing. Yes, she can give a good interview. And yes, she can fit in just perfectly on Yellowjackets. “It’s really a thrill to work with an actor like that,” Cypress says. “She’s a real freaking pro.” To quote Ambrose herself, it’s all in a life.