'American Gods' bosses wanted me to be gross: Emily Browning

Despite getting her start on screen doing Australian TV when she was a youngster, Emily Browning spent most of her career honing her skills on film sets.

With her role as the troubled - and troubling - Laura Moon in American Gods (based Neil Gaiman's book of the same name) she's returned to the screen in what seems to be TV's heyday, and in arguably one of the most highly anticipated book adaptations since Game of Thrones.

"I hadn't read the book before I signed on," Browning says. "I thought Laura was such an interesting, cool, character and that it would be great to play someone so awful."

"It was intriguing to act as someone who didn't have to be likeable and, if anything, is meant not to be," she adds.

"That's often one of the first things people bring up about choosing roles: they tell you 'the audience has to love you'."

But showrunners Bryan Fuller and Michael Green encouraged Browning to ignore that idea.

"They wanted me to go further. They allowed me to be physically disgusting. I never got the feeling they wanted me to look pretty. They wanted me to be gross. That's uncommon in my line of work."

While the Moon character was thoroughly fleshed out in the script for the fourth episode, Browning says the rest were being written while filming took place.

"It's been amazing seeing how she evolved in the writing, based on my performance," Browning says. "It felt collaborative in a way film hasn't felt for me before."

WATCH the trailer for American Gods

 American Gods has received criticism from some quarters for its depictions of people of colour and their lived experiences. But Browning says: "That's probably not really the question for the white girl to answer.

"I'm part of a show that's genuinely diverse in a way I don't think we see on television enough. It's tricky for me as well, because in the show someone described her as the 'personification of white privilege'. I fully understand that, in that sense, she's the bad guy. And that's a big responsibility. I want to do the best I can in being a part of that discussion," she says.

"I was having a conversation with someone about Laura being a racist character. On reflection we realised we're white and as such we don't get to decide what's racist or isn't.

"We've never been oppressed because of the colour of our skin," she says. "It's one of those situations where I should sit down and let other people do the talking."

• 'American Gods 'is on Amazon Prime Video.

• This article was originally published in The Times.