The Freeform original series The Watchful Eye follows Elena Santos (Mariel Molino), a young woman with ulterior motives that lead her on a path to working as live-in nanny for an affluent family in Manhattan. Once inside the Greybourne, she realizes that everyone in the building has secrets of their own, and staying focused on her plan might end up being a lot more challenging than she ever could have imagined.

During this 1-on-1 interview with Collider, Amy Acker (who plays Tory Ayres, the sister-in-law of Matthew, the wealthy widower that Elena goes to work for) talked about why this project appealed to her, all the fun and unexpected twists and turns, how much she knew ahead of time, what her character really wants, that Tory is misunderstood, and the threat that Elena represents. She also talked about why Angel and Person of Interest, and her roles in both shows, hold such a special place in her heart.

Collider: When this came your way, what reeled you in? When you’re doing a TV show, you don’t get all of the information up front, so what were the seeds there that really interested you in this?

AMY ACKER: Oh, gosh, there was a lot. The pilot script was so different than anything I’d ever read, and this part was something that I felt like was different for me, as well, and something I hadn’t gotten to do. And then, I knew that Jeffrey Reiner was directing it, and I had friends who had worked on Friday Night Lights and had been singing his praises forever. They were like, “You should work with him, at all costs,” so that was another big plus. But I think it was just the idea that this is a mash-up of different genres. I wanted to know what direction it was gonna go next, so I was like, “I wanna be a part of this and see what happens.”

Image via Freeform

I love stories like this, especially because I think I’m pretty good at figuring out where something is going, and a lot of times I do. But it’s so much fun when I don’t know where something is going, and I often had no idea what was coming next, as I was watching this. I also love to read books that are like this.

ACKER: It’s funny, you’re right, it does feel like a book that I would read because you get like this little break of romance in the middle of being stuck down a hallway. There are just so many fun twists and turns, and you never know who to trust. I feel like it changes with every episode. We felt that way filming it, too. We were like, “Did you do it? I think you did it.”

Once you were doing this role and you had signed on to do the show, did they give you any of the secrets? Did you have a sense of your character’s background and journey, or were there still things that you weren’t sure of, up until the very end?

ACKER: It was a little of both. They gave us information that was necessary. I knew about being the sister and what had happened to Allie. That really affected, at a baseline, how I was playing the character. But even within that, I had so many questions. And sometimes, if you’d ask different people, you got different answers. I was like, “Wait, maybe no one knows. I don’t know what’s happening.” It was constantly evolving. Or they had it all figured out and just liked to make us feel like we were in the show, in real life, like little chess pieces.

Are you someone who typically likes to have as much information as you can get when you’re doing a TV show, or are you someone who only likes to know what your character would know? How do you navigate that?

ACKER: I’ve been so lucky to get to work with such great writers, starting with Joss [Whedon], and then Jonah Nolan and J.J. Abrams. I love the idea of not knowing, and being surprised and finding stuff out. I like to guess and see if I’m right. I remember on Angel, I was 100% certain that Fred was gonna end up with one character, and then I got an episode and Fred was with Gunn, all of a sudden, and I was like, “Oh, I haven’t been playing that, at all.” With this, I made a very strong backstory for myself, that I wrote down. I was like, “This is what I think happened.” At one point, I sent it to the producers and I was like, “I’m just playing off of this. Would you tell me if I’m like totally wrong?” And they were like, “That looks fun. Do that.” So, it was a little of both.

Image via Freeform

What would you say it is that Tory wants, and will she get what she wants, by the end of the season?

ACKER: I think Tory’s main thing is that she wants to protect everything. She wants to protect Jasper. She wants to protect Matthew. She wants to protect the Greybourne name and the building and the image. She very much wants everything to be picture perfect. Her life is like a social media life, where you don’t see the bad because that’s how she wants it to look from the outside. She’s very willing, having grown up in the world and knowing what she’s fighting for, to do whatever it takes, at all costs, to make sure that those things are protected. In that sense, there are ups and downs. She wins some things and she loses some things, but she never stops fighting.

She also feels like someone who is a bit misunderstood. As one of the people who knows her better than anyone, what do you like about Tory? What should viewers know about her, that they might not be aware of because of how she is when we meet her?

ACKER: Yeah, I think she is misunderstood. All the other characters, when they talk about her, don’t have a ton of nice things to say about her. I think she comes off reserved and a little uptight, which initially feels like a negative thing. But for me, her vulnerability is what was attractive. She does care about everybody. At the core of it, she really cares about family and tradition. I think that’s where people will become compassionate for her, I hope, maybe eventually.

She feels like somebody who has created this version of herself that is really a protective mask for other people. Do you think that’s how she protects herself?

ACKER: I think that’s totally true. She has this fear that, if she were to express these emotions and she were to let that come to the surface, everything would fall apart. You see her trying to hold things together and hold things down, and make everything shiny and happy, or as happy as it can be at the Greybourne. She’s feeling grief, she’s feeling loss, and she’s lonely. There’s this idea that, just because you’re rich, you may not have any of these problems. That’s how Elena comes into this story. There are the haves and the have nots, and it’s very black and white. If you have stuff, you have a great life and you don’t have these feelings. But there are so many layers to these people. I think Elena starts to see that, just because you’re born into this life, it doesn’t make you happy.

Image via Freeform

Elena clearly is a bit of a threat to everyone in this family and everybody in this building. Do you feel like Tory was complacent before Elena shows up and that it takes something like that to be the catalyst that pushes her in a way that makes her act like she might not have otherwise?

ACKER: Yes, Elena really is the catalyst for the whole thing, for the people in the building changing. When Tory meets Elena, red flags are going off in every direction. It causes her to heighten her awareness of everything that’s going on, and it brings out the parts of her that people are wary of. Elena sees Tory at her worst when she comes in because Elena is so not part of this world and is so different, and that scares Tory. She thinks Elena might see something that no one else does. Elena is no bullshit. She calls everybody on who they are and where they are, and she’s not afraid to shake things up. That’s Tory’s biggest fear.

What is Tory’s relationship like with her brother-in-law? What sort of relationship did they have, before this death that really is affecting them both?

ACKER: As the series goes on, you start to learn that Tory and Matthew have had a pretty intricate past, and that their past goes even further back then his marriage and relationship with her sister. There’s a real history there. It was fun for me because, with Warren [Christie] and I, this is our fifth job we’ve been on together. I’ve known him for 20 years. I love doing scenes with him. I have such a familiarity with him and such a comfortability with him. It was nice to see Tory get to have that relationship that she doesn’t have with anyone else. There’s just something different about how they are. Even though she seems to drive him crazy a lot of the time, when they’re able to open up and just be and breathe, there’s something really nice about their relationship.

Image via CBS

People are always going to identify you with Angel and with Person of Interest. What do those characters mean to you? When you play a character for that long of an amount of time, do they just always hold a special place in your heart?

ACKER: Those two characters, in particular, are so special. With Angel and just being part of that world, that was my first job. I feel like so much of the opportunities I’ve had since then have been from being a part of that show. We would have an episode that was a horror episode, and then we’d have a comedy episode. You feel so lucky, as an actor, to get to be a part of projects where you can do so many things. That’s what Person of Interest was, as well. I got to play so many different characters. And there is still such a huge fan base for both of those shows. For the people who love them, it’s just amazing that people still care about those shows and have passed them down to their kids. I feel like I’ve gotten to meet so many amazing people, with both of them. Person of Interest opened up the whole LGBTQ world, with Root and Shaw. I’ve heard amazing stories from people who that character affected, in a positive way. I feel like I made a lot of really impactful friendships with fans that still, to this day, I carry from both of those characters.

And the thing that both of those shows have in common with The Watchful Eye is that they snuck under the radar, and presented themselves as one thing, when they turned out to be so many other things.

ACKER: Exactly. That’s the fun part of it. Every time we got a script, we were like, “What are we leaning into, this time?” It feels like a gift to open scripts like that, where you can be at a masquerade ball, or doing this or that. It was really fun. And it feels like there’s so much more of this story to tell. The world is so rich and they did such an amazing job with the sets. They have such a great cast, and there’s this whole world that they’ve created. It feels like something that would be nice to get to explore more of.

This show is a whole mood. I would want to go hang out in this building, if I didn’t have to worry about getting murdered while I was there.

ACKER: Exactly. I was like, “Would it be weird, if I put that wallpaper in my house?”

The Watchful Eye airs on Monday nights on Freeform.