Playing a character as chronically composed as Queen Elizabeth must be like acting in a straitjacket. The part requires a performer to rely on her eyes and subtlest of facial expressions to telegraph every emotion, from white-hot anger to apathy. Even with those limitations, The Crown’s Claire Foy managed to make the famously restrained monarch seem a bit soft and sympathetic—a testament to her finely tuned, Oxford-calibrated craft. But after inhabiting Elizabeth Windsor for 20 episodes of prestige television, Foy wanted something different.

So, two months after wrapping the Netflix period drama, the English actress threw on a hospital gown to play a paranoid American mental patient in Steven Soderbergh’s Unsane, a thriller shot on an iPhone. And in a weird way, that was better than any vacation.

“You would think I would go on a big, long holiday and just chill out” after The Crown, Foy said in a recent interview. “But doing Unsane was the best possible thing I could’ve done, because it was completely different, so free, and short. We did it in 10 days. Steven Soderbergh is a genius. And I got to throw everything against the wall, scream a bit, and not care about the consequences. That’s how Steven shoots, and how he feels about films—that you’ve got to just be brave and jump in. It was really cathartic.”

Foy also had to jump feetfirst into an American accent, given the tight filming schedule. Luckily, she had help: “On set, I was surrounded by Americans, so I had to just pretend, and then every once in a while, Steven would [let me know when I veered into] a bit of a Scottish accent or something,” she said. “With acting, I think so much of it is about being brave and just doing it. Often people get scared of doing accents and therefore try to mumble their way through it. But actually what I’ve learned is you’ve got to sort of just shout it, and then you’re brave enough to kind of make it a bit more subtle eventually.”

After Unsane, Foy pivoted again by playing the goth vigilante Lisbeth Salander in The Girl in the Spider’s Web, coming this fall. To prepare for the Swedish Stieg Larsson character, Foy worked with William Conacher—her dialect coach on The Crown, who also gave her a crash course in American accents for Unsane. When The Girl in the Spider’s Web premieres in November—her first big-budget movie-star showcase—the film will be the third 2018 feature to star Foy, following Unsane and Damien Chazelle’s Neil Armstrong biopic First Man, out in October.

Foy learned to diversify about a decade ago, after she was flooded with period-drama pitches following her U.K. breakout Little Dorrit, a hit Charles Dickens miniseries adaptation. “In this industry, you just have to be brave enough to say no [to roles],” said Foy—the third or fourth time she extolled the importance of being “brave” during our 15-minute phone call. “And it doesn’t mean you’re being ungrateful. It doesn’t mean that you’re never working again. It doesn’t mean that you don’t love something. But you have to say no in order to have new experiences and challenge yourself.”

“I don’t necessarily want an easy time when I’m acting,” she continued, noting that at times she’s considered herself “a bit masochistic” for making such dramatic leaps between characters. “But I’m not in this job for it to be easy. I love the struggle of it. I love the difficulty. I love the pushing the ball up the hill quite a bit of the time.”

Now, having spun through three different characters and accents in the span of one year, Foy is finally allowing herself a break from filming. She recently received her second Emmy nomination for playing Queen Elizabeth, meaning that she and her nominated co-stars Matt Smith, Vanessa Kirby, and Matthew Goode will have at least one more reunion at next month’s ceremony, before the Netflix drama leaps forward in time for its third season, with new actors assuming their old royal roles. Foy will pass her scepter to Olivia Colman, but said that she did not confer with her successor about the character: “If anything, I was like, ’I’m going to leave you completely alone. Have a nice time,’ just because you don’t need many cooks getting involved. . . . We spoke on the phone, but we didn’t have an [in-person] powwow.”

Given her current blank slate, Foy said that she hasn’t had the opportunity to negotiate any new jobs since March when The Crown producers revealed that Foy had been paid less than her male co-star Smith—an embarrassing pay gap. When I asked how Foy has changed her negotiation strategy going forward, she was quick to self-deprecate.

“It is hilarious to think that I would even have a negotiation strategy,” Foy said. “I am not a negotiator or a strategizer. I’m an actor, and if I started trying to negotiate, it would go abysmally.”

Growing more serious, she added, “I’ve got nothing lined up. . . . But I’ve learned so much from it about how much I should be involved, or what I can ask when I would’ve been too scared to ask before. Now I just think, ‘What’s the danger? They’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, we’ll just offer it to someone else’?” If so, that’s fine. But in life, you have to be able to ask.’ There are no stupid questions, especially when it comes to standing up for yourself.”

For the moment, though, Foy has been enjoying her downtime. Recently, she went out to see Vanessa Kirby headline a production of Julie at London’s National Theatre, and the actress is still affectionately baffled by her screen sister: “The thing about Vanessa is that she’s a star. She literally sparkles all over her. She’s out of this world. . . . But I know her and what she’s like, so I’m a bit like, ‘You’re so amazing, but you’re a complete wally sometimes.”

When Foy is blown away by another actor’s performance, she said, she doesn’t get jealous. “I get terrified. I just go, ‘Oh, my God, how have they done that?!’”

Foy felt that way twice recently—once seeing Kirby, and the other when she watched Lily James channel a carefree, overalls-clad, younger version of Meryl Streep’s Donna in Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again.

“Lily was amazing. She’s so kind of effervescent and unscathed, and just kind of like non-cynical. I was just looking at her going, ‘How are you doing that? You’re like a ray of sunshine!’ I mean, you just think, ‘If I was playing that part, I would be awful!’ So I’m not likely to get jealous. But I do get happy, dumbfounded, and sort of just kind of like . . . lost for words. She was brilliant.”

As for the movie at large: “I want to eat it,” Foy said of the sequel, which she saw with her actual sister. “It makes so many people happy, and the world is so sad. It was just a great two hours.”

In fact, she was so giddy she couldn’t stop talking about it: “Andy Garcia, for me, was the real highlight,” she said. “At some point, I was like, ’That’s Andy Garcia!’ Wasn’t he a revelation?”

Foy had such a fantastic time at the ABBA musical that during her screening, a fellow theatergoer actually shushed her. “We were told to be quiet in the cinema,” Foy said. “We were enjoying it too much.”

It’s shocking to imagine anyone hushing The Crown’s Queen Elizabeth in a darkened movie theater. But Foy, having left that role far in the rearview mirror, was flabbergasted by the reprimand for another reason.

“I was like, ‘You’re in Mamma Mia 2. What are you talking about, woman?!’”