There is a hashtag doing the rounds on Twitter – #AnnDowdAsEveryVillain – that captures the essence and antithesis of the American actress Ann Dowd.

With a scrappy brown wig and a slight Irish accent, comedian Andrew Farmer does his best impression of Dowd playing the Joker, the Wicked Witch, Voldemort and even Ursula the Sea Witch.

It's true that Dowd has been everywhere lately playing a smorgasbord of terrifying characters: the cattle-prodding, brainwashing enforcer Aunt Lydia in The Handmaid's Tale, the leader of a chilling cult in HBO's The Leftovers, the devil-worshipping Joan in 2018's hardcore horror movie Hereditary, or a brooding nun with a dark past in Foxtel's forthcoming mini-series Lambs of God.

Ann Dowd in Lambs of God, her fifth nun role.Credit:Mark Rogers

But at the end of the last day of filming for the mystery-drama Lambs of God, just before sunset on a crisp winter day in the Blue Mountains, she was the real Ann Dowd, the woman described by those who meet her as a mother hen, a ray of sunshine or reminiscent of your favourite third grade teacher.

"She made this amazing speech and said that when she came out [to Australia] she was initially worried about leaving her family behind in America, but when she got here she found her new family," Lambs of God producer Jason Stephens recalls.

"She was in tears, we were all in tears, even the macho boom operators and grips were reduced to tears by this beautiful woman speaking from the heart. From the first day right to the last, Ann was somebody you wanted to be around. She just carries this aura of kindness and warmth and curiosity in other people’s lives."

Dowd is, as one headline described her, the nicest person with the scariest roles. She greets me in a coffee shop in New York's Chelsea neighbourhood with a hug and calls me "honey" and "dear", occasionally touching my arm gently as she tells a story.

Villains have become her speciality or, rather, complex and dark characters who aren't easy to love. And nuns, too – Lambs of God's Sister Margarita is the fifth nun she's played, a role she's attune to after being raised in an Irish Catholic family in Massachusetts and educated by Catholic sisters.

Ann Dowd in Lambs of God: "I'm not going to judge."

"Outliers appeal to me tremendously, I love them," Dowd says, sipping a black coffee and drying her tousled auburn hair after walking here in the rain from her nearby home of 30 years, a housing development she shares with her husband, acting teacher Larry Arancio, and their youngest son, 14, who they adopted. She apologises for being a little sketchy today due to a draconian diet she started on Monday (the same regime she adopted to get into the character of disciplinarian Sister Aloysius in Broadway play Doubt). She is forgetting names and catching herself veering off on tangents, from her two aunts who were Catholic sisters to the "treacherous" roundabouts in Sydney and back to the appeal of playing tyrants and sufferers and barbarians.

"It’s challenging and rewarding to play a character who, for whatever reason, has chosen to live in a very rigid space or belief when there’s so much to the contrary available, which adds to the complexity," she says. "And also not to judge her. When you want to get to know one of those characters, it's like being in a relationship. I’ll tell you about me, you tell me about you, I’m not going to judge."

Dowd is masterly on screen; her face seems to hold the expressions of multiple women and lifetimes, her performances are vivid and magnetic. Lambs of God is no different. Based on the Australian author Marele Day's 1997 novel, it follows the last three sisters of the Order of St Agnes, who live in extreme isolation on a remote island, until an attractive young priest stumbles upon them. (There are subtle parallels to The Handmaid's Tale too, another tale of women standing up to male-dominated institutions of power, and one that has taken on a real-world significance in the age of Brett Kavanaugh and abortion crackdowns, two developments that gave Dowd the chills.)

It's a strange, off-the-wall story that is hard to pigeon hole. That was part of the appeal for Dowd, who admits she had "no idea" how to approach the role on her first day of filming. The opportunity to work in Australia for two months was another drawcard, a chance to atone for her last experience of the country, which began with a panic attack.

Jessica Barden as Sister Carla (left), Essie Davis (Sister Iphigenia) and Ann Dowd (Sister Margarita) confront Sam Reid (Father Ignatius) when he arrives unexpectedly at the convent.Credit:Mark Rogers

In 2016, Dowd raced to Melbourne to film scenes for The Leftovers, with the actor Justin Theroux, just after she'd seen her daughter off to college. It's obvious that Dowd is proudly maternal, mentioning her children several times during our interview. When her 27-year-old son, who is autistic, moved to a community for disabled adults in upstate New York, she couldn't get out of bed for four days. When she and Arancio drove their middle child to college, they had to pull over three times to compose themselves. Flying to the other side of the world the next day proved to be too much.

"I have trouble with my children leaving home," she says. "I’m like, 'Why does anybody have to go anywhere?'"

I'm an optimist and I have a fairly good amount of denial.

Dowd may not have moved from her small Chelsea apartment in decades but her career is going somewhere at breakneck speed. At 63, she is hitting the prime of her professional life, part of a growing cadre of actresses finding their golden years in their 50s and 60s. Men have long been afforded middle-age star power but now it's being rightly claimed by women too, such as House of Cards' Robin Wright, Australian Jacki Weaver, whose career took a stunning turn at 63 with her first Academy Award-nominated role in Animal Kingdom, and established actresses such as Frances McDormand, Nicole Kidman and Laura Dern, whose roles seem to get more compelling and esteemed with age.

It's no doubt fuelled, in part, by the voracious demand for high-quality content from an increasing number of streaming services but perhaps there's a subtle shift in attitudes too.

"I gotta tell you, I don’t know the answer," Dowd says when I ask why she's at the busiest point in her career now. She had five films come out last year, all of them showing at Sundance. She gets offers for parts, rather than auditions.

"It was always an issue: as you get older, actresses blah blah," she says, not allowing herself to articulate the hackneyed adage of work drying up for older actresses. "I never allowed that to penetrate because I just couldn’t adopt that way of thinking. I am an optimist and I have a fairly good amount of denial. When I think that I was 35, pregnant with my first child, working in a flipping pet shop on 14th Street! Do you know what I mean? And no part of me said, 'Uh, excuse me, you need to get real here!' So there is no shortage of gratitude."

As brainwashing enforcer Aunt Lydia with June (Elisabeth Moss) in The Handmaid's Tale.

Dowd had a handicapped start to acting. Raised in a family of seven kids who were encouraged to become doctors or take over the family insurance business, she lumbered through four years of pre-med school before deciding to pursue her true passion. She credits some encouragement from an intuitive teacher and a roommate who bonded with Dowd over their mutual grief; she lost a brother and Dowd lost her father when they were in their final year of high school.

Success did not come early though. Dowd would get almost paralysed by stage fright and was so nervous in auditions that she would stutter. But she was undeterred.

One day in her late 20s, while catching the train to her waitressing job in New York, she saw a limousine parked outside a theatre advertising About Last Night starring Elizabeth Perkins, her drama school classmate.

"I thought, 'I’m going to wait on tables and she is going to her premiere of her big film and that hit me like boulders," she says. "I went home after work and was sitting on the porch sobbing, in despair. I said, 'When? Why? What is happening? When is it going to happen?' Then there was a quiet voice, 'All will be fine, you will be in your 50s, you will be 56'. Well, Compliance was 56 and that’s when things changed."

Dowd quietly worked away for years, appearing on Broadway, in series television and in regional theatre, often alongside Arancio, who she met in the 1980s when they did a master's thesis at Chicago's Goodman Theatre School. But her role in 2012's Compliance, as a fast food restaurant manager who unwittingly allows the sexual abuse of a cashier, was her big break, winning her a supporting actress award from the National Board of Review.

Breakthrough role: Ann Dowd as Sandra, a restaurant manager, in Compliance.Credit:Magnolia Pictures

In hindsight, she's glad success came later in life. "What I do realise about those years is that I was not ready by any stretch," she says. She was too calculated with her characters, thinking she could apply the same rote learning she used in med school for acting. She was too consumed with what audiences thought of her.

I just was terrified. I spent a lot of years in fear.

"I remember the review from the first play I did out of acting school said, 'Who is Ann Dowd and where will she go from here?' You'd think I'd be skipping down the lane saying, 'A critic said this!' But I just was terrified. I spent a lot of years in fear."

She has never read a review since and, she admits sheepishly, she rarely watches the shows she's in. She doesn't want to muddy the joy of performing.

"The joy comes in the doing," she says. "That experience in Leftovers [of filming scenes in which her character sacrifices herself] is one of the most extraordinary days I’ve ever lived on this Earth and I never want to take away from that."

Likewise, filming episodes of season three of The Handmaid's Tale that delve into Aunt Lydia's back story were "the best eight days of my life", she says, "because I knew her, y' know".

Each role seems to top the last, each day of filming is more satisfying, each villain more ghastly and joyous than the one before. It seems Dowd is only just getting started.

Lambs of God is screening on Foxtel from July 21.

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