Martha Plimpton: strong jaw, great cheekbones, alabaster skin, eyes of a Siamese cat. Maybe you first saw her in Richard Avedon’s blunt, fetishistic Calvin Klein commercials of 1983, or the next year, capably holding her own against Tommy Lee Jones in the film The River Rat, or a few years later in the Hollywood classics The Goonies and Parenthood. Then the ’80s blinked into the ’90s and Plimpton’s face disappeared.

If you check her IMDb credits, there are some indies, some TV movies, a few shorts. She says it wasn’t her choice—that Hollywood types had pretty much decided her face wasn’t for them anymore. She moved east, from L.A. to Chicago’s famed Steppenwolf Theatre, where she starred opposite John Malkovich in The Libertine, following in the theatrical tradition of her mother, Shelley Plimpton, who performed in the original Broadway run of Hair.

Throughout the 2000s, she toggled between long periods of stage acting and short spurts of network television. Her savings ran out; she was the commercial voice of a popular pet food brand. Between 2007 and 2009, she received a Tony nomination every year. And two years ago, about two seconds before she was about to go broke again, she was offered the role of Virginia Chance in the FOX network comedy Raising Hope—her first-ever regular series gig. To quote her: “Thank god. Thank Jesus.”

I met Martha Plimpton at her home off Laurel Canyon Boulevard—a rustic little nest that is more of an urban tree fort than a house. Her scruffy wheaten terrier mix, Eloise, bounded around the corner and barked a greeting. Then Plimpton arrived—her face virtually (shockingly) the same as it was in those Calvin Klein ads. We sat in her backyard for two hours, drinking red wine. I noticed that when she spoke, there was a suppleness to her jaw, as though her maker could have given two more brief turns to the screws in the bones but decided against it. She answered my questions with intelligence, gameness, and muscle, while remaining appealingly casual about the ordeal of acting.

—Kathryn Borel

I. THE GANG

THE BELIEVER: How would you characterize yourself as a kid, growing up in the theater scene? Were you a cool guy? Or a big nerd?

MARTHA PLIMPTON: I grew up in New York as a child actor, so I didn’t get sucked into any machines. I wasn’t in the Hollywood scene. I didn’t hang out with those people. One of my dearest friends in the world is Ethan Hawke. We’ve known each other since we were fifteen or sixteen. He had a theater company called Malaparte. It was the epicenter...