The novelistically named Willa Fitzgerald (an accidental portmanteau of Willa Cather and F. Scott) does not merely project booksmarts; Fitzgerald’s sharp mind propelled her from Nashville, where her parents were indie musicians, to Yale, where she laid groundwork for a more-than-a-new-face breakthrough. “I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to be an actor by profession,” she says. “There were other, more academic things that made me deeply happy. I had also seen how hard it was to have a life as an artist [by watching my parents].”

But once in New Haven, Fitzgerald immersed herself in the raw materials of the dramatic arts, balancing psychology classes with starring in mainstage Shakespeare productions. “I have always just [been a] critical think[er], which I really enjoy bringing to my work [now]—breaking down scripts and [finding] the tendons that hold the story together,” she says.

The fictional narratives she’s tackled include Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings, a recent Netflix series of country classics expanded to episode-form. “I got to learn how to ride horses, talk in a southern accent, and be a firecracker farm girl,” she recalls. “And that was really fun—[especially] because Dolly was, rightfully, such a presence growing up in Tennessee, and [in person] she is so amazingly authentically who she appears to be: the best storyteller and just so incredibly generous.”

Outside of ivy halls or Dollywood, Fitzgerald’s gigs have ranged from tutoring stressed-out New York City kids (“I have never witnessed such stress,” Fitzgerald recalls) to adapting literary achievements. After playing Meg in BBC’s 2017 Little Women reboot, Fitzgerald was the upper-crusty love interest Kitsey Barbour in this fall’s The Goldfinch. “I have always been a voracious reader,” she says, “but it’s definitely a happy accident that I [also] really love the process of adapting novels into TV and movies.”

For her next project, based on the neo-noir novel Dare Me, Fitzgerald is back on literary terrain. “She’s at the center of the mystery, and the shit show that she really brings to [this] town,” says Fitzgerald of Dare Me’s Collette, a departure from the put-together Kitsey—unless you’re a critical thinker. “Collette is very repressed, like Kitsey,” Fitzgerald adds. “Are we sensing a theme? Maybe we are all very repressed! Maybe that’s the moral of the story.”