it’s the day after her 44th birthday, and Linda Cardellini is already having the best year of her life. The night before, she joined her friend singer-songwriter Regina Spektor on Broadway to duet “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” for Spektor’s residency at the Lunt-Fontanne theater. She describes how Spektor instructed the whole audience to say “Happy Birthday” to her as she walked out onstage, and handed out cupcakes at a gathering after the show. The next day she is still basking in the afterglow of this sublime experience.

For Cardellini, a self-described lifelong “late bloomer,” it was another dream coming true on her own timeline. Cardellini was singing in the school hallway as a kid when a teacher overheard and drafted her into plays. A theater kid ever since, she tells the story of an NBC event in 1999, right after Freaks & Geeks was picked up. “I remember somebody asked me, What are you doing next?,” presumably asking about television roles. “And I was like, Oh I’m doing this medieval play festival in Italy.” She was just as excited about the Italian medieval play festival as booking the pilot. Her favorite musicals are Hair and Jesus Christ Superstar. Asked who she’d play in JCS, she says “they’re all great roles, especially Judas.”