Christina Hendricks talks about her role in Tin Star as Elizabeth Bradshaw - brought to the Canadian Rockies by North Stream Oil as vice president of stakeholder relations.

With plans to take over the entire town of Little Big Bear, Elizabeth is charismatic, steely, and extremely self-assured. Ambitious in all ways – and with plans to create change in the industry – she will do whatever it takes to keep her newfound power.

She is not one to be messed with, with her legal wiles something that keeps any adversary on her toes, as well as her own agenda at play.

Speaking ahead of the launch of season one, Hendricks spoke about being the US representative in the Rocky Mountains, her favourite memories from set, and Mrs Bradshaw’s true motivations…

I play Mrs Bradshaw, an ex-journalist who is invited to have a seat at the table with the oil industry. She’s someone who’s been critical of it for years and she’s told, listen, if you join us and do PR this is an opportunity to change the industry from the inside. So she goes in with the enemy thinking that she’s going to make some changes and ends up in Little Big Bear, a small town with a new refinery coming in and there’s obvious conflict.

We start out with Mrs Bradshaw addressing the community. She walks in and says, “Hey, I’m going to tell it like it is, I’m the new kid in town, this is what we’re doing, we really do want to hear your thoughts.” She really goes in with an open attitude and hoping the community will take her in, and you can tell within that first moment that some are very sceptical about the situation.

Others think it may help their business, so she’s going about town holding out an olive branch and trying to make everyone feel like it’s going to be OK. This refinery brings a whole new element – people, workers and corruption – to what was a very peaceful town and a good place to raise your children, so obviously there’s a lot of controversy and she finds herself right in the centre of all that.

I loved the idea of seeing the oil industry on screen. We’ve mostly only seen that in documentaries before. I liked that it was a character in the story, and that Mrs Bradshaw is involved and trying to justify her business with it and trying to see it in a positive light, or as something she can change. And yet as it comes in, and it starts to change the town, it’s clearly doing no good. So she continues to have to justify, justify, justify and that changes who she is as a woman.

It is an internal struggle for her to be working at an oil company. It’s everything that she’s been against her entire career, but she really does go in there thinking that she’s smart enough to make some changes. Being the voice against it hasn’t really done anything so she’s taking it in a different route.

Oh I think everybody has multiple sides to them. Mrs Bradshaw definitely has an ambitious side. She’s struggling with the demons within her to be ambitious and move forward in her career while maintaining her voice.

It was a bit unusual to be the only American there. I really enjoyed working on an Albertan accent. It was a tricky one to do because it’s so similar, but then there are these words that trip you up and tonal changes.

You’ve really got to be on your toes, because you can get too comfortable in your own accent. So I had to work on it every single night. But a lot of the time no one realised I was doing an accent – it was only when I slipped back people would say, “Oh yeah, you don’t normally say things like that.”

There were moments when I asked why the character wasn’t questioning things more. Her background is in PR and journalism and it seemed like she was letting things go past her naively.

At times initially she would be turning a blind eye or just assuming things were going as she thought. It was a challenge to get in her headspace, so we had to work on getting the character to reflect her own history.

I just think the locations were so stunning. It took us an hour to get to pretty much every location we shot, so my mornings were always a really amazing Canadian road trip to one place or another. The sun would be rising, with the mountains in the background and beautiful open fields. That was spectacular every day.

It’s a little-known fact that, much like Joan from Mad Men, you play a mean accordion. Could you imagine that being something Mrs Bradshaw breaks out at the end of a long day at the office?

I never imagined that she was very artistic or creative. I see her as much more of a logical and regimented person. She’d probably let loose by drinking too much wine. I think that’s her escape.