On a balmy mid-March morning, Amy Ryan stood outside of a Brooklyn Heights café, exactly nine minutes—and a full week—early for our planned interview. At this point, I was in Los Angeles, had yet to see her Broadway production of Doubt, and had nothing prepared. I texted her that she had the wrong day, a bit nervous as to whether we’d still meet up as scheduled since her calendar was, well, a little packed. “Hahhahha!” she responded quickly. “Welcome to my tired brain.” She assured me we were all set for next week.

No human alive can blame Ryan for the tired brain. She’s spent the last two months pulling off what many in her field would consider next to impossible.

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

A revival of John Patrick Shanley’s Tony Award–winning play, Doubt: A Parable, was already in previews this February when its lead actress, Tyne Daly, was forced to leave the show due to health issues. Director Scott Ellis and his producers needed to either find a suitable replacement or abandon the project altogether. Ryan was a week away from a ski trip with her family when she got a call from Jim Carnahan, the Broadway casting director who had been her agent back when she was 19, offering her the part of the indomitable Sister Aloysius. She would have next to no preparation time. 

“I’d never get the opportunity to do a role like this. It doesn’t come around to me,” says Ryan, an Oscar- and Tony-nominated actor known mostly for supporting parts. “Intellectually I knew I had to say yes. I thought I was being an adult by saying, ‘Let me call you tomorrow.’ But I knew.”

The news went off like an earthquake in New York. “My first thought was, ‘Well, this is perfect, she will be truly perfect,’” says Ryan’s pal Sarah Paulson, who’s currently enjoying an acclaimed Broadway run herself in Appropriate. “Followed quickly by the thought: ‘That’s the scariest fucking thing I can think of having to do as an actor. And there is literally no one more capable than Amy Ryan.” Ryan’s old friend Laura Linney tells me that “more than likely, no future challenge will ever be as frightening as this. And once you know, through experience, that you can face such a challenge, and face it successfully, it strengthens your spine tenfold. That is a great gift that only the bravest artists earn.”

The day after she formally joined Doubt, Ryan started sleeping on an Aerobed in her home office. She’d wake up at 5:30 in the morning. She eliminated caffeine, sugar, and dairy from her diet. She’d read the whole play—a dense and complex study of faith and certainty set in a ’60s Bronx Catholic school—straight through twice, before zeroing in on a given scene. She started developing headaches and popping Advil. She’s a vegetarian, but found herself craving meat like never before (though she never acted on those cravings). “I was running faster than I ever have, internally,” she says. On days where there wasn’t a matinee, she’d head to the Todd Haimes Theatre around noon to rehearse with the cast—which included Liev Schreiber, Zoe Kazan, and Quincy Tyler Bernstine—before returning home to go over the play by herself all over again for the afternoon. She sat for a few previews in which Daly’s understudy, Isabel Keating, took the reins.

Then, not even two weeks after saying yes, Ryan took the stage. “That first day in the dressing room, it was so weird. I remember crying like a baby, going, ‘Boo hoo, oh no,’” she says. “And I talked myself out of it. I said: ‘No. No. No. Not the time for emotions.’”

She tells me this over coffee—yes, she’s now sneaking a few cups—at that same Brooklyn Heights café. She beams a kind of relaxed confidence, maybe even a little bit of pride. Ryan has successfully filtered out most of the noise and speculation surrounding this all-timer of a show-must-go-on Broadway saga, but knows, in essence, what I know: A few weeks beyond opening night, this Doubt is a certified, critically acclaimed hit, with its limited engagement already extended to meet audience demand (it now runs until April 21). “The panic has subsided,” Ryan tells me with a smile. “And the fun has started.”

A few years ago, I spoke with Tiffany Little Canfield (no relation) about her experience assembling the ensemble of Only Murders in the Building, which originally starred Ryan in a key role. From a casting director’s standpoint, she told me, “Amy Ryan is top. Incredible taste, she can do anything.”

That about sums up her reputation in the theater scene. After growing up in Queens and graduating from LaGuardia High School’s theater program, Ryan broke out as, funnily enough, a replacement in ’90s Broadway productions of The Sisters Rosensweig and The Three Sisters. In 2000, she earned her first Tony nomination for her riotous turn in Uncle Vanya. “I will never forget the moment she decided to play Sonya with a pronounced unibrow,” says Linney, who played Yelena in that revival. “It still makes me giggle 24 years later, because it was perfectly Sonya, and perfectly Amy, to think of it.”

Ryan also earned a Tony nomination for playing Stella in A Streetcar Named Desire, and had amassed an impressively lengthy Broadway resume—to say nothing of her Oscar-nominated film career, highlighted by 2007’s Gone Baby Gone, or her beloved TV roles in The Wire and The Office—before Doubt came along. But it’s taken three decades on the Great White Way for her to play the lead, and of course, she hardly took the conventional route.

“There’s the kid in me that went to performing-arts high school in the neighborhood, and I get to this theater and look up and I’m like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m up there,’” Ryan says. “There’s also the adult part of me, with 30-plus years of doing this, going, ‘Yeah, that’s right. Why not me? I’m good for it.’” She continues, “I’m smart enough to know there are other elements at play. I know a major marquee name wouldn’t say yes to this, and I think they knew that too.”

I press Ryan a bit on why she thinks the producers went to her. Daly is more than 20 years her senior, and while Ryan’s versatility precedes her, Sister Aloysius is typically played by relatively imposing presences, like Cherry Jones (who originated the role on Broadway) or Meryl Streep (who was Oscar-nominated for the film adaptation). Schreiber, who has known Ryan casually in the theater scene for decades, recently cited a short list of actresses that he and Ellis, the director, could conceive of pulling off such a feat. As they looked it over, they said to each other simultaneously: “It’s Amy.” Ryan remains skeptical of where she ranked on that list. “I had to believe it, that I was the one for the job,” she says. “I have the ability to do this, and I say that cautiously. But I’m like, where’s Edie Falco? Laurie Metcalf?”

And yet when you see Doubt—at least at the time that I did, about a month into Ryan’s run—you remember what a canny, nimble, powerhouse performer she is. Ryan has shaped the role to her strengths, transferring Aloysius’s background from the Bronx to Queens and imbuing her with a steely resolve. Ryan’s comedy chops have been well-known across screen and stage, so her clever command of Aloysius’s “muscular” language, as she calls it, is no surprise; she spins her monologues with a dry, knowing wit. Ryan and Schreiber are around the same age too, which makes the dynamic between Aloysius and Father Flynn, the school’s chummy priest whom she suspects of sexually abusing a young Black student, far different than Shanley’s text implies.

Watching previews, Ryan noticed that in the revival’s earlier iteration, “there was a bit more reverence toward [Aloysius]—they were not going to raise a voice at her.” She chuckles to herself: “I’m too scrappy. I’m from Queens.” We watch her and Schreiber really go at it, culminating in the play’s electric final confrontation. “Neither of us are afraid of the other one as actors,” Ryan says. “And we’re both going to keep fighting for our side.”

Getting there was not easy. “I was so rigid and so robotic in some ways in the beginning,” Ryan admits. Her agent attended early on and told her, “It’s flat. It’s not there—there’s no fun in it.” For Ryan, that was “the next dose of fear I needed.” Shanley came to a later show and suggested Ryan bring out even more of the Queens in Aloysius, an accent choice Ryan initially made on the fly, without the luxury to experiment. The community swiftly rallied around her. The first note Ryan received backstage came from Daly, who Ryan says is now in good health; it said simply, “Thank you.” Friends like Paulson and Linney offered support. “My literal first job was understudying Amy in The Sisters Rosensweig on Broadway having just turned 19,” Paulson says. “I feel as though I have always had a front row seat to witness Amy’s magic and power on stage.”

The support she received, says Ryan, “was kind of embarrassing in a beautiful way. That’s the thing: The actors know. They know.”

At the beginning of previews, Ryan surreptitiously referred to a script on Aloysius’s desk and stumbled over certain lines. Now that she’s comfortable with the text, she’s constantly massaging and refining her performance with a burgeoning confidence that serves the role well. Ryan and Schreiber still have spirited, friendly disagreements about the trajectory of their characters’ climactic clash, particularly, and Ryan has developed a new ritual to keep things fresh. “I think it’s a bunch of malarkey, but someone once said, ‘If you want to change the energy, just cut a little bit of hair out of the nape of your neck,’” she says. “So I always cut a piece of my hair after a show. I don’t think it does a damn thing, but I do it because you never know.”

For evidence of Ryan’s range, go see Ryan in Doubt and then watch Sugar, Apple TV+’s trippy Los Angeles noir premiering Friday. Ryan sinks her teeth into one of her juiciest series roles to date: a faded rock star battling alcoholism. She’s introduced drunkenly singing karaoke at a bar, makeup smeared and voice hoarse. Detective John Sugar, played by Colin Farrell, anxiously looks on as he prepares to interview her about a case he suspects she knows about. Ryan is magnetic—charismatic, sad, and utterly vulnerable, the opposite of Aloysius’s measured precision. The character embodies a Patti Smith–esque punkness that impresses even the actor: “I have never played someone so cool.”

“She’s…a brilliant actress and person and just honest as the day is long,” Farrell tells me. “No bullshit about her. Something Irish about her too, in her humor and her access to such a raw, emotional interior world.”

Ryan’s Melanie goes from femme fatale figure to Sugar’s improbable partner in crime-solving. They anchor a modern detective tale steeped in retro visual flourishes, the most fun of which finds Farrell and Ryan zooming down Hollywood Boulevard in a 1964 blue convertible Corvette. “Colin’s like, ‘What the hell do you think a kid from Dublin and a girl from Queens have the right to be in this car right now?’” Ryan recalls, in a follow-up video call, with a wide grin. “It’s the sense of knowing and appreciating where you came from, because that allows you to appreciate where you are now.”

We can technically add Farrell to the list of men Ryan has played opposite as the love interest—or former love interest—which is already quite a group: Steve Carell in The Office and Beautiful Boy, Gabriel Byrne in In Treatment and Louder Than Bombs, Steve Martin in Only Murders, Michael Keaton in Birdman, Tom Hanks in Bridge of Spies, and Paul Giamatti in Win Win. “I’ve repeated myself too much with wives and girlfriends,” Ryan says. Admittedly, some of these roles were richer than others—but in each, Ryan makes an indelible impression.

She carries a warmth, an openness, and a certain familiarity evident both when she’s acting and when she isn’t. “Amy’s generosity as a scene partner is without compare,” Farrell says. It’s what makes her more recent risky choices—from her blue-lipped terror in Beau Is Afraid, to her wrenching star turn in Netflix’s Lost Girls, to these two current projects—so galvanizing. In her words, she’s good for it.

Ryan first filmed in Hollywood in 1991 (a guest spot on Quantum Leap). She didn’t know where to find her mark on set, how to deal with mics, what she was supposed to do. She didn’t like LA and didn’t feel at home with all the driving and sun. This was two years before Ryan made her Broadway debut. Flash-forward 30 years and here she is again on Broadway, finally in the lead, and here she is back on TV in LA, finally embracing the city she’s resisted her whole career. I ask what that 23-year-old TV novice would think of her future self, in that Corvette next to Colin Farrell, her 42nd Street marquee hanging a few thousand miles away.

“She’d be psyched. Her head would’ve imploded, though,” Ryan says. “It’s a good thing it happened so many years later.”