Ellen Gray: Natalie Zea adapts to new roles fast

JUSTIFIED. 10 p.m. tomorrow, FX.

PASADENA, CALIF. - To follow the recent career of Natalie Zea is to see a quick-change artist in action.

Before she was Winona Hawkins, the more than mildly conflicted ex-wife of Elmore Leonard's hotheaded hotshot Raylan Givens (Tim Olyphant) in FX's "Justified," she was the much-married Karen Darling in ABC's "Dirty Sexy Money" and Jemma, the chronically dissatisfied customer in HBO's "Hung."

Earlier this season, Zea popped up for a few episodes as a prosecutor who gets busy with Jerry O'Connell's character in CBS' "The Defenders."

And if you didn't happen to recognize at the time that the same actress was playing each of those parts, well, that's the way Zea seems to prefer it.

She tries to look different from role to role, the actress said last month, in an interview during the Television Critics Association's winter meetings.

"My hair is a big deal. I try and make it so that I start with the hair" in creating a character, she said, laughing.

"And then the voice is really, really important to me, for everything. And I've tried to be very distinct about the way in which the character talks for every project I do," Zea said.

"I intentionally want [Winona's look] to be very different from the 'Hung' stuff or any kind of lawyer - like, for instance, no blazers, she does not do blazers - we're very specific about what she wears . . . Makeup artists make a huge difference. And I try to vary it up.

"Winona does not get fake lashes. Which at first I was pissed about and then my makeup artist was like, 'She's in Kentucky. You have beautiful eyelashes. You don't need it.' So just little things here and there, that I think add up, make a huge difference."

It's a difference that can translate into roles that go beyond the "the bitchy girlfriend or the bitchy wife or the bitchy lawyer or bitchy fill-in-the-blank" parts she's often offered.

"I think I do it well. So I'm kind of a go-to," she said, laughing. "I'm pretty bitchy, I guess. I mean the common denominator is me."

Still, she prefers to be cast against type.

"I've had to fight tooth and nail . . . I had to fight for ['Justified'], I had to fight for 'Dirty Sexy Money' - because they weren't things that people immediately thought I could do."

Did she like "Dirty Sexy Money's" Karen Darling?

"I loved Karen Darling. She's my best friend," she said, laughing. "I was ready to call it a day, but for the two years that I did that, it was really fun."

So, in a different way, is Winona.

Particularly this season, when the remarried Winona's embroiled in an affair with Raylan.

It is, Olyphant told reporters, a "surprising" development for the two characters.

When he first heard about it, he told executive producer Graham Yost, " 'You know, if someone comes to dinner and tells me

they're f------ their ex-wife, we might not talk about anything else for the rest the night.

"The next line is, 'And how is that going to work?' " added Yost. "Which is a nice problem for writers."

It's also a nice problem for Zea, who tends to be pragmatic about these things.

"If you're sleeping with Raylan Givens, you get more screen time. So I was pretty happy about that. As long as I'm in the sack with him, I get to show up to work more," she said.

Last season, she said, "she felt a little wedged in" to a story in which she was never meant to be more than a guest star - a plan that changed, Yost said, when "she popped" - but "this season they've done such a great job of making it a bit more organic to have her around."

It doesn't hurt that the Texas-born Zea has what she calls "a rather sick romantic view of divorce."

She was 2 when her own parents split up, "but they had a really interesting relationship after that. I always felt that there were some very, very fond feelings there and sometimes were perhaps even acted upon. They took a trip to the Virgin Islands to celebrate their divorce," she said, adding that their relationship left her feeling there was something "nostalgic" and "unrequited" about it, even if she thinks they were ultimately better off apart.

Could the same be true for Raylan and Winona?

"I had said earlier to someone, 'I don't know where this is going, and I don't think anyone does, and I really like that.' Because I think it's just going to be determined by . . . some sort of flow. I don't think it's going to be determined by any kind of preconceived ideas of on-again, off-again. That's going to get tiresome," Zea said.

"I still like not knowing. Because the character doesn't know." *

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