Kim Dickens talks Lost, Deadwood, Friday Night Lights, Sons of Anarchy, and more... | EW 

She’s currently the lead star on the show that broke records for the biggest premiere in cable television history, but before Kim Dickens started fighting off zombies on AMC’s

she made a habit of popping up on some of the best TV shows of the past decade. We sat down with Dickens to get her thoughts and memories on her other notable small screen roles (

“There was no improvising. There was no dropping words. It was so specific to the sound, the meter, and obviously to the meaning. You’d have to apply certain tricks to memorize it sometimes.”

Dickens got her big break playing madam Joanie Stubbs on David Milch’s HBO western, a role and show she still holds dear to her heart. Here’s what she had to say about trying to decipher Milch’s scripts.

The dialogue was very dense, and I believe it’s metered. At least that’s my impression of what I remember hearing. But we didn’t have scripts. The pages came in daily, and we didn’t have a tremendous amount of time with that language, and I do think it took a few passes of just reading it to translate it for yourself the way you would Shakespeare in a way, and then to actually memorize it, because it’s not exactly the way we speak now, that’s for sure.

So to memorize it was challenging too, and this is material that we performed verbatim. There was no riffing. There was no improvising. There was no dropping words. It was so specific to the sound, the meter, and obviously to the meaning. You’d have to apply certain tricks to memorize it sometimes.

But that show really holds a really strong soft spot in my heart. It was a magical experience in the period alone and with David Milch. I had what felt like real artistic license, and there were no scripts or notes from someone else. We had the pages daily, and we shot them, and David was on set with us.

We were at Melody Ranch, and David would come down and sort of talk us all through. When we were doing a new setup for a new scene, he would come down and speak to all of us, the cast in it, the director, the crew. We would all just be on the edge of our seat. He’s such a wonderful storyteller and speaker, and he would give us the feeling of what we were really playing, or the essence of the scene, or what the emotions were to capture, and then the director would execute it.

It was a really beautiful and magical experience. If you pass by it on the television or something, it’s so in the moment. The minutiae between these people, these characters, it’s so rich. If you do watch it over, there’s so many more things to get, you know? It just keeps giving.

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