Viewers who watched the second season of Euphoria (and there were a lot of them) will remember Martha Kelly. She arrives in the season premiere as Laurie, a mild-mannered drug dealer whose true menace lurks just beneath the surface. “Rue, if you screw me, I’ll have you kidnapped and sold to some real sick people,” she threatens Zendaya’s opioid-addicted character after providing her with $10,000 in product. “I always find a way to make my money back.”

When Kelly appears on my Zoom screen, she greets me with the same deadpan delivery that makes Laurie so unnerving. But it soon becomes clear that’s the only similarity between her and the character. “I’m always kind of nervous with interviews, so I apologize in advance if I say anything really dumb,” Kelly tells me after already apologizing for her cat, Gary, whose insistent meowing will filter in and out for the remainder of our conversation.

Kelly’s presence in Euphoria is so arresting that it was startling to see her later pop up in the final season of Grace and Frankie as a discerning probation officer. Kelly then opened the second season of Hacks as Barbara in human resources, who must intervene in the tricky workplace dynamic between Paul W. Downs’s Jimmy and Meg Stalter’s Kayla. Her impressive TV run also included five episodes in the Watergate drama Gaslit, where she played President Nixon’s scatterbrained secretary, and one-episode arcs on sitcoms I Love That for You (as a vape-smoking disbarred lawyer turned astrologer) and American Auto (as a grating employee who abuses Ana Gasteyer’s newly minted “open-door policy”). To put it plainly, Kelly has appeared in an airing series every single month of 2022.

Perhaps the only person who hasn’t seen her unprecedented year on TV is Kelly herself. She’s only watched Euphoria so far, the 54-year-old tells me—nervous about diving into her grab bag of other guest spots. “I get really self-conscious when I watch myself,” Kelly admits. “I was in Albuquerque for three weeks in May doing a small part in a movie, and I didn’t want to go into that [feeling] self-conscious. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been trying to find the perfect emotional balance to watch.”

Kelly’s extreme modesty is as singular as her droll voice. This self-doubt was what almost stood between Kelly and her breakout role in the FX comedy Baskets. In 2014 she got an unexpected call from fellow stand-up Zach Galifianakis, whom she’d met at an open mic in 1998. “Hey, I’m making a pilot for FX. I want you to be in it,” he told her. Kelly tried to talk him out of it. “I was like, ‘I’m not an actor, I can’t act. I don’t know how to do that.’ And he said, ‘Well, you don’t have to, you just say the lines the way you would say things in real life.’” At the time, Kelly was proofreading online by day, performing stand-up at night, and living with her parents. Baskets seemed like a step up—and she also knew that “Zach is a good person, so if I try it and I’m terrible and they have to fire me, they won’t be mean about it.”

In the year after Kelly’s four-season run ended, Euphoria creator Sam Levinson came calling. Now Kelly was trepidatious for an entirely different reason. “This is a dramatic show with real, gifted actors,” she remembers thinking. “Then I read the part. I was like, ‘I can’t play this monster. I’m a comedian, I want people to like me.’” Kelly asked her agent and manager at the time, “What happens if I get there and then it’s awful?” she recalls. “They were like, ‘Well, you would call us.’”

But many of her worries were eased after meeting with Levinson. “I was a little choked up on my way home from meeting him,” she says. “I called my agent and manager. I was like, ‘I can’t believe that I’m going to get to do this.’”

Before she could delve into the darkness, Kelly told Levinson she was uncomfortable with the sexual implications of one particularly sinister scene. In Euphoria season two’s fifth episode, a strung out Rue shows up on Laurie’s doorstep. The drug maven offers to curb Rue’s withdrawal by injecting her with morphine while she bathes. “In the initial script that I read, she was much more creepy, physically, with Zendaya, and there were implications about human trafficking and stuff,” Kelly tells me. “In the scene where Rue gets into the bath, in the script, Laurie basically undresses her because she’s shaking so much. I was like, ‘That’s very pedophilic and I don’t want to do that onscreen.’” Kelly says that Levinson was “very understanding” of her request, noting how that element of the scene was shot out of focus to ease her fears.

Most of Kelly’s screen time was shared with Zendaya, who reassured the actor after she flubbed her lines during their first take together. “She acts like a kid who’s home from college. She doesn’t act like one of the most famous people in the world,” Kelly says. She also found herself stunned by Zendaya’s ability to slip in and out of her Emmy-winning role. Kelly compares her costar to Adam Driver, whom Kelly worked with in Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story: “Neither one of them was in character between shots,” Kelly says. “But they could go from small talk with somebody to ‘okay, rolling, action,’ and immediately be in character and be really natural and believable. The level of concentration that that must require—it’s just really impressive and really intimidating because I’m like, ‘I know my lines, guys. That’s what I bring.’”

So what was it like watching herself in a role that Variety says should make her a “bona fide star”? Kelly found herself fixating on an all-too-human element. During the aforementioned bathtub scene, “I’m in a short-sleeve shirt that shows more of my arms than I want to,” she says. “It’s a low angle—no middle-aged women, acting or otherwise, want a low-angle camera. And I was like, Fuck. But then I was like, Well, worst on-camera fear is realized—short of just being naked, which I’ll never be on camera. It’s fine, and no one came onto my Twitter to be like, ‘Fuck you.’”

In fact, that was the episode for which Kelly says she received the most social media love—much to her surprise. “Once in a while, the internet gets mad at actors, especially women, who play characters who do things they don’t like,” Kelly says. “Sometimes they go online to be mad at the actor, and I was kind of scared that would happen—but so far it hasn’t.”

Many in Euphoria’s passionate fan base have even discovered Kelly’s stand-up in the wake of season two. “I did not know scary drug lady from Euphoria was a comic,” one viral TikTok featuring a clip of Kelly’s set reads. “I really did think, This is a villain,” Kelly says. “It’s also on a show with a bunch of model-level attractive young people, and then I’m a middle-aged monster. I was really afraid there’d be a lot of mean comments, but I was very surprised at how sweet they are.” Kelly, who is only now dipping her toes back into stand-up after a pandemic-induced hiatus, isn’t sure whether her newfound recognition will cross over. “By the time I’m doing it more, I don’t even know if Euphoria fans will remember,” she says.

Viewers surely won’t forget that Laurie’s story line is left frustratingly unresolved in season two. But one has to believe that a seasoned drug dealer won’t be forgetting the $10,000 Rue owes her anytime soon. “A couple months ago I asked about it, and Sam hadn’t started writing season three yet. I probably won’t find out about whether Laurie’s going to be in it for maybe a year or so,” Kelly says, adding, “I’m a little afraid if Laurie does go back, you’ll find out more of what a monster she is.”

The other actors on Hacks, Kelly says, “are way funnier than I am and way more comfortable acting than I am.” Molly Shannon, star of I Love That for You, sent her “an extremely sweet email, and my response was very starstruck, so I probably ruined it.” When she started on Gaslit, a period drama about the Watergate scandal, Kelly “really thought it would be a serious show where everybody hates me, but it was fun.”

She admits that her imposter syndrome can be a problem. “My first response to any offer is, ‘I can’t do that,’” Kelly says. Then again, in an industry dripping with ego, Kelly has a refreshingly practical approach to showbiz. “I just am so focused on making the director happy and not making the crew’s day longer, giving the other actors in the scene what they want, that when they get the shot and then I’m wrapped for the day, I’m like, Okay, no one’s mad at me. I did what they wanted and I can feel good about it,” she tells me. “It’s different from stand-up, [which] is something I love and I’d do for free and will do for the rest of my life, even if I never get paid. But with acting, it’s like, this is a job.”

Does she see her fear of failure fading anytime soon? “It’ll probably always be something I think about, just because in 2014, I was 46. That was my first acting job,” Kelly points out. “So I don’t think I’ll ever be confident acting.” She’s also frank about her perceived limitations as a performer. “I mean, I can’t do stuff like cry on camera,” Kelly tells me, “and occasionally directors have seemed a little frustrated—not Sam, but [with] other things I’ve done where it’s like wanting me to emote some complicated feeling…Because in real life, when I’m actually really feeling intense feelings, they don’t easily come out, so it’s like, that’s not going to happen in front of a camera and crew.”

It’s Kelly’s monotone inflection—and its ability to evoke both creepiness and comedy—that makes her presence so disarming. I ask if it’s strange for people to fixate on her voice, given that it’s not an affectation or accent. “I keep thinking that at some point, someone is going to be onto me and be like, ‘She’s actually just playing the same person in every show or movie.’ So I’m insecure about people being like, ‘Oh, this is just a party trick, not real acting,’” Kelly says with a slight shrug. “But at the same time, acting is the only job I’ve ever made a good living at, so I will ride it out as long as I can. And then when it ends, I’ll be like, That was really fun, and I can’t believe I got to do it.”