Over the past two months of Emmy campaigning, Gold Derby has spoken with several contenders in all categories. Now with voting underway ahead of the July 15 unveiling of the nominees, we have compiled 16 interviews for stars vying for Best Drama Actress, including: (Happy Face), (Matlock), (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), (Bridgerton), (Yellowjackets), (House of the Dragon), (Found), (Pachinko), (Landman), (Severance), (Yellowjackets), (1923), (The Handmaid's Tale), (Grotesquerie),  (Yellowjackets), and (Elsbeth).

Read on for highlights from each interviews and links to watch our full video Q&As.

For the Paramount+ series, Ashford plays Melissa Reed, the daughter of 's , aka the Happy Face Killer, who's in prison for murdering eight women.

"My mom is actually the true crime aficionado in the family," she explains. "So, I called her right before I read the script, and she gave me the lowdown. But the podcast is quite extraordinary. Not only do you get to hear Melissa's journey, but you also get to hear her navigate her conscience, her relationships with the people in her family, and also the relationships that she has to the victims' families. What was the most interesting to me about the real Melissa is how she's become an advocate for people who've been touched by the trauma of crime."

Watch our complete interview with Annaleigh Ashford.

For the CBS legal series, the title character is a smart, savvy, 70-something lawyer who takes a job at a firm to ostensibly pay off her late husband’s debts, but is actually seeking evidence of a coverup of the opioid issues that contributed to her daughter’s death.

“Even though I've had a long career and people know who I am, I was feeling a little bit invisible,” says Bates. “But more than that, I wasn't challenged by the work in the same way. I hate to say I was losing interest in what I love to do, but you really need to find something that you really love to do. And it was a miracle to find something this well-written, this exciting, this unusual, and this deep.”

Watch our complete interview with Kathy Bates.

For the Prime Video series, Clark plays Galadriel, an elf who in this time period has been tricked by the evil Sauron () and now will stop at nothing to destroy him.

"It was amazing for me to be back with Charlie but him giving a completely different performance," says Clark. "It was really exciting for me as an actor to be able to see this craft of Charlie's" in his new guise as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts. "I could barely recognize him. ... Charlie's such a lovely person that it was really quite incredible for me to be frightened of him."

Watch our complete video interview with Morfydd Clark.

The third season of the Netflix series ended with 's Penelope Featherington marrying 's Colin Bridgerton.

At the beginning of those episodes, Penelope has "sort of given up on herself," Coughlan explains, and "she's kind of accepted her fate [and] given up on the idea of love, which is something that has driven her since the beginning." But when Colin comes back into Penelope's life, everything changes. "I loved the charting of the whole season and the way that there was something so compelling in each episode," she says.

Watch our complete video interview with Nicola Coughlan.

By the beginning of the Showtime drama's third season, Taissa (Cypress) has completely blown up her life. Having become the first state senator to "impeach herself" before taking office, she has destroyed any chance she had at a political career.

"I always thought that Taissa was a narcissist. Everything she says comes from an 'I' perspective. You can go back to Season 1 — everything she says, even when she is trying to get rid of her wife in Season 1, she's like, 'I don't know what I'm gonna do.'... So I knew that about her, and so I took that even further," Cypress shares. "I was like, 'Oh, this is narcissism to the nth degree where she has completely created this other thing that she can blame that's not her.'"

Watch our complete interview with Tawny Cypress.

For the HBO series, D'Arcy plays Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, who experienced some truly epic moments during Season 2 of the Game of Thrones prequel, including meeting up with Alicent Hightower () in secret and watching as Daemon Targaryen () finally pledged his loyalty to his queen.

They say, "It was a favorite scene of mine. Getting to act with Liv is one of the great privileges in my life. But as a result of such scarcity, there was quite a lot of pressure on it. You have two big, knotty dialogue scenes in which to house the whole of that relationship. It felt to me like we were being asked to achieve an epic scale within quite small, narrow parameters. It's very silly as well, because it's a high stakes environment, and I'm wearing a wimple. [Laughs] I'd say that's more work for Olivia than it was for me, because she would have been the one looking at me."

Read our complete interview with Emma D'Arcy.

For Hampton's Gabi Mosely, the second season of the Peacock series was a quest for penance. And although her team at Mosley & Associates eventually forgave her for keeping her kidnapper Hugh Evans, aka Sir (), imprisoned in her basement — and lying to them about it — she has yet to be able to give herself the same grace.

"Even after all the good she does, the one thing that Gabi is a master at is torturing herself," the actress says. There's "a lot of work that she still has to do. Healing is a process; it takes years. We are used to seeing characters tied up in a nice little bow, but that's not real life. And what we're trying to do, in a lot of ways, is show that process and how long it can be, so that people watching it can be like, 'OK, I'm still in my stuff too. I don't have to be finished.'"

Read our complete interview with Shanola Hampton.

Kim stars as Sunja, who is introduced in Season 1 for the Apple TV+ series as a young woman in Japanese-occupied Korea who falls pregnant after an affair with married businessman Hansu (Lee). She eventually marries pastor Isak () and they move to Japan to start anew.

"She's still young. She's 35 years old. I am 30 years old right now, and I'm still a baby, but in that era, it's a different thing. I had to convey how she suffered," she explains. "I had to talk about it a lot with the directors and Soo, and with our makeup department to make very subtle wrinkles, a very subtle like eyeshadow to make her look exhausted. I talked a lot with the actors as well, like how could I have to walk, and I had to search a lot of things that made a voice different when they got old."

Watch our complete interview with Minha Kim.

The Paramount+ series stars as Tommy Norris, the right-hand man for a powerful West Texas oil executive (). Larter plays Tommy's ex-wife, Angela, who is first introduced during a FaceTime call while vacationing with her new husband. It doesn't take long for her to make her way back to Texas.

Larter was immediately drawn to working with creator , who "loves his women to be emotional roller coasters. That to me, as an actress, is so exciting because I'm trying to hold it together for my family and figure out how I'm going to piece this together." She adds, "I love getting to play this woman who lays it all on the line. She wears everything on her sleeve. It's really exciting to get to play somebody that powerful."

Read our complete interview with Ali Larter.

The second season of the Apple TV+ series is about a near-future, retro-tinged dystopia where people could separate their work selves from their personal lives. The team behind the show, including Lower, joined our recent group discussion, where she discussed her approach to playing the innie and outie versions of her character.

"For me, I use a lot of analogies. They sound like different music in my head. I use music a lot when I'm getting ready in the morning," Lower explains. "I'm also informed by how my costars are behaving with me, how the scene is written, how it's directed. There's a lot of inspiration once you get to set by the elements around you that are shifted slightly based on where you're at. Obviously when I'm Helena posing as Helly, Helena had a similar job to myself as an actor, which was to blend into this family that she is encountering for the first time. And she's having to do the same kind of role as we do as actors, which is to assume an identity and to move around like that person. And I think it was something we worked really closely on with [director] [Stiller]. We were trying to figure out what things slip through. When is her acting not so good? And when is she able to tap into that part of her, that inner-rebel that she's maybe abandoned from childhood or has maybe never had full access to. Especially in [Episode] 204 [“Woe’s Hollow”], she gets a kick out of playing against Milchick and getting to be the one in the classroom who's disrupting. Well, not the classroom, but the campfire."

Watch our complete interview with Britt Lower.

Season 3 of the Showtime series saw Lynskey’s character, Shauna, delve into darker, more chaotic territory — a turn the actress found exhilarating.

"It was fun because it felt like what the character has been building to," Lynskey explains. "From the beginning, I had the information that she’s really trying to repress this side of herself. It’s been fun when I’ve been able to let it out in little bursts. In [the first two] seasons there were little moments where it came out — but it went so wild this season. It was fun."

Watch our complete interview with Melanie Lynskey.

The Emmy and Oscar winner stars as Cara Dutton opposite Harrison Ford for the Paramount+ western series created by Taylor Sheridan.

She says, “Both Harrison and I, for the first time in our lives, had to commit without reading a single word of the characters or the story or anything. Because Taylor said he likes to write for the actor that he's got, he likes to write knowing who he's writing for, which I thought was very interesting.” But for Sheridan, she was willing to take the chance. “We knew the history of Taylor's writing, And you know what? What a remarkable, brilliant, extraordinary talent he is. So we took a leap into the dark.”

Watch our complete interview with Helen Mirren.

The star, executive producer, and director were in the same physical place by the end, but the eight years between the series premiere and finale of the Emmy-winning Hulu adaptation of Margaret Atwood's seminal novel saw a huge evolution for both her and her character.

"As an actor at the end, and as a director as well because they're so intertwined, it was so meta," Moss says. "I hadn't been back to the Waterford house in however many years it has been since June had been there. But I know how that felt, and I was able to then carry it into the scene. There [were] a lot of amazing memories, and there [were] also a lot of complicated memories of being very cold and it being very late at night and things like that — not quite as complicated as June's memories."

Watch our complete interview with Elisabeth Moss.

The FX series from Ryan Murphy begins with Nash-Betts' Det. Lois Tryon investigating several horrific murders in a small town, but viewers are soon thrown for a loop.

"I will probably be working with Ryan until the day they throw dirt on my face," she says. "I love Ryan Murphy. I love him as a partner. I love him as a creator. I was so interested to see what was next, what was going on in his mind. And when I read that script — oh my gosh!"

Watch our complete interview with Niecy Nash-Betts.

The Season 3 finale for Showtime left fans with another cliffhanger — Natalie (Sophie Thatcher) calling for help from a mountaintop as Shauna (Nélisse) takes her throne as the Antler Queen.

"I remember reading it and being like, 'This is so sick!' We were so excited, and I really wish that all of the cast could watch the finale together because it's such an important moment for us," says Nélisse. "When it ends with Natalie on the mountain, I was screaming out loud. We weren't there when she was shooting that scene, but I knew exactly how she was going to act it out, and I was like, 'This is going to leave people with their jaws just dropped on the floor.'"

Read our complete interview with Sophie Nelisse.

Preston has portrayed Elsbeth Tascioni — a delightfully unpredictable attorney — for more than 15 years. What began as a recurring Emmy-winning character on The Good Wife evolved into a fan-favorite performance that continued on The Good Fight and now leads her own CBS series, Elsbeth, heading into its third season.

“I love Elsbeth’s curiosity and her wonder and her positive attitude,” she says. “It takes discipline to approach the world that way. It's infectious. I love getting inside of that mindset every day because it really helps me in my life.”

Watch our complete interview with Carrie Preston.