Meet Nimrat Kaur, the Actress You Love to Hate on This Season ofHomeland

“I love being told how evil I am all of a sudden. It’s giving me great pleasure right now, I have to say!” Nimrat Kaur is almost eight thousand miles away when we reach her by phone, settled at home in Bombay for the first time since starting her work on the fourth season of Homeland this June. Even at that distance, however, it’s very clear that the cheerful actress is not used to being thought of as a villain. As the nefarious Tasneem Qureshi, Kaur plays a Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence officer plotting against Claire Danes’s Carrie Mathison, who has been promoted to the CIA’s station chief in Kabul, even while her character meets with U.S. officials on a regular basis. And when it comes to embodying a spy as insidious as she is smug, Kaur has pretty much nailed it in this season’s eight episodes so far.

The atmosphere on the Showtime show’s Cape Town set, however, was far from hostile. “It was lovely, actually—warm and loving,” she says. “Sometimes, Claire and I would have these massive giggle attacks. We just couldn’t stop laughing when things got out of hand.” Kaur, who was first introduced to Western audiences in the Cannes Film Festival darling The Lunchbox, goes on to explain why playing a Pakistani government official wasn’t the stretch one might imagine for the Indian actress. “In fact, I had to think less about being Pakistani than about being a woman in a position of power in such a patriarchal society,” Kaur says. “That was a very exciting space to explore, as an actor.” Still, the biggest leap of all for the affable 32-year-old will always be the character’s treachery. “I credit [the casting directors] for imagining that I could take on this role,” she says. “It was a risk for them—I would hope!”