'How To Get Away With Murder' Q&A: Marcia Gay Harden Talks Taking On Annalise! 

\'How To Get Away With Murder\' Q&A: Marcia Gay Harden Talks Taking On Annalise!

Marcia Gay Harden has just made it harder for Viola Davis' Annalise Keating to figure out "How to Get Away with Murder."

At the end of last week's mid-season return of the addictive #TGIT ABC drama, Marcia showed up as Sam Keating's sister, Hannah, a woman who in one brief appearance raised the stakes. She turned up right after Jack Falahee's Connor was grilled by the cops, and he was there just in time to overhear her insisting to the Philadelphia Police that her brother is no murderer.

With a truce between Annalise and Connor, thanks to her offer of protection, the law school student quickly called his professor to give her the news about Hannah's presence in town, and for the first time in a while, Mrs. Keating had an expression fans didn't need to second guess. Annalise was rattled.

WATCH: 'How To Get Away With Murder' -- Sneak Peek At Thursday's Episode

In the run up to Thursday's new episode, Oscar winner Marcia (for her role in 2000's "Pollock") told

about how Hannah will be shaking up the show, and how much fun she's had squaring off on screen and in character against fellow fierce actress Viola.

AccessHollywood.com: Had you been watching the show before you joined in on the fun?

Marcia Gay Harden: I'd watched some of it. … I'm not allowed to be hooked because I have three kids, so my schedule doesn't allow for being hooked, but I was mesmerized and entranced and couldn't wait to get back to it. When I was cast, I had to go back and look at every single episode all over again because I needed to make sense of the character… and if I say that, 'Oh, Sam and I were hanging out on a certain weekend,' and that weekend was mentioned in Episode 2 where he was doing something, I had to know so that I could put the right spin on the moment.

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Access: I have to ask you about your line at the end of last week's episode: 'My brother is no murderer!' But what is he to Hannah Keating, because saying he's not a murderer doesn't mean he's the loveliest of brothers?

Marcia: No, that's a good point. No one is the best of people and I think Hannah is -- to me, she's a little bit rule-bound. She follows the rules. She wouldn't approve of cheating. She's a single woman… and her brother didn't follow the rules. Her brother had a wife, then he had a mistress, then he married his mistress and now he has another mistress, and… I'm pretty sure Hannah knows about that. And so, she's discovered moral and character flaws in her brother that she doesn't have herself that she doesn't approve of. Is she high and mighty? I don't know. Just because you disapprove of someone being an adulterer, it doesn't make you high and mighty, so I would jump to her defense in that, but she is disapproving to a degree. But, he's her brother and she loves him, so it doesn't matter at the end of the day if he's an a**, an immoral a** -- that's probably what she would say -- he's her brother and she loves him and he's missing, and what happened? … That he's being accused of being a murderer -- it doesn't fit. It doesn't sit right with her and that's where intelligence and her profession -- she's a psychiatrist -- come into play, that she can kind of sniff these things out and go, 'Hmm… This doesn't feel right. This doesn't smell right.' She's a bit of a bloodhound and so she picks up on a clue or picks up on something that's wrong and then tries to decipher it.

Access: Defense attorneys can hide their emotions, but are we going to get to see you picking apart Annalise because of your character's background?

Marcia: I think what you see is, yes, less a professional sense of picking apart or the women going at each other, and more in a personal way, more [of] a, 'Cut the sh**!' way. Like, 'What is the truth? What is being hidden? Why are you hiding?' And trying to shake the truth out of the game. We were on set one day and someone had said to me, 'She's playing chess,' and I said, 'I don't think Hannah's playing chess. I think Hannah's taking the chess game -- the board itself -- and throwing it in the air and smashing it on the table and saying, 'I don't want to play chess any more. What's the truth? What are we doing?' This show is about strategy and how to get away with murder, and certainly, that would be about laying clues, false clues, all these different ways that one would get away with murder. What I love is each time [Annalise] teaches how you plant a doubt in somebody, what you focus on in doubt and what you focus on in the negative and the positive, and so that's kind of how to get away with murder -- until you don't. Every episode they've gotten away with it, and so I think Hannah's introduction is like, maybe you don't. And when you don't, what is the red herring? What is the problem that's brought in and in this case, it's a little history.

Access: I was on set last week and Matt McGorry (Asher) said watching you and Viola was a bit like when he had Godzilla and the King Kong fight. And I don't know if that revealed that he plays with action figures, but it was funny because when I mentioned that to Viola, she said, 'I want to know which one is Godzilla?' I'm going to see if you want to chime in – which one of you is Godzilla and which one is King Kong.

Marcia: It is a fun question because is one supposed to be more representative of right or wrong? King Kong or Godzilla? I don't know. I think she is simply formidable in the character of Annalise. She is a sensual general, is how I think of her, and she's a general in full uniform, full artillery. She's got lots and lots of weapons, including her emotional life. In her emotional life you never know if she's being sincere or manipulative. You just don't know. She could break down sobbing on the ground and you wait for that little eye to lift that might tell you as an audience that, 'Oh, this is manipulating, it's tongue in cheek,' but Viola doesn't give you that. Both eyes lift and it's blank and you don't know. You literally don't know. She's not telling you it's tongue-in-cheek, she's just – you don't know.

READ: 'How To Get Away With Murder's' Viola Davis On Marcia Gay Harden's Surprise Character

Access: That must be so fun for you as an actress going in there. Batter up!

Marcia: Well that's it. It's batter up. It's, let's play, let's go, let's fight, let's improv. We'll come up with our own text. Let's be as fierce as we can be in pursuit of this particular scene and yeah, it was very exciting. Very exciting.

Access: Finally, I have to ask you if your co-stars in 'How to Get Away with Murder' were asking about 'Fifty Shades,' because that's the other thing that you're doing which is huge this month?

Marcia: Everybody's asking about 'Fifty Shades.' Everybody wants to know if it's going to turn them on. I mean, that is the bottom line -- are we gonna watch this movie and get turned on? And I think if you read the books and you got turned on, you'll watch the movie and get turned on.

"How to Get Away with Murder" continues Thursday at 10 PM ET/PT on ABC. "Fifty Shades of Grey" (Marcia plays Christian Grey's mother, Dr. Grace Trevelyan Grey) opens on Valentine's Day in theaters.

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