Carla Gugino has been shot, stabbed, haunted, cloned, and turned into a parole officer with a mean streak, but in Gunpowder Milkshake she gets to add “prim librarian with a secret weapons cache” to the résumé. “It’s a visual feast,” she tells me, clearly relishing the film’s candy-coated chaos. “There aren’t a lot of movies that are just old-fashioned movie magic in that way.”

The old-fashioned part being the neon blood geysers and women dispatching mobsters with hardcover novels. Gugino pitched her character, Madeleine, as the one who clings to books over bullets—until a child wanders into the library. Then she swore off swearing, but not killing. “Usually it’s the wallflowers that have the most going on,” she laughs.

She lights up talking about music, which is unsurprising given how much it fuels her performances. “I make a playlist for all my characters,” she says. In Gunpowder Milkshake, Janis Joplin crashes in at her most pivotal moment: “You can’t get a bigger gift than that.” She remembers another scene, opposite Giancarlo Esposito, built around Nina Simone: “It feels like a cheat when you get a scene partner like that, even if they’re not alive anymore.”

The conversation drifts to Sparks, whose Edgar Wright doc she saw at the Alamo Drafthouse in Austin. “What’s so compelling is the reminder that whatever your passion is, that’s the thing that carries you through life,” she says. For an actor who’s been at it since 13, Gugino finds comfort in Sparks’ late-career renaissance: “Maybe the best is even yet to come.”

Her coming-of-age soundtrack zigzags from Cat Stevens and Neil Young in Big Sur to Oingo Boingo, The Cure, Liz Phair, and Mazzy Star. Today it’s Lana Del Rey’s lyrics and Courtney Barnett’s sharp wit. And then there’s her Troop Beverly Hills castmate Jenny Lewis: “She wasn’t interested in acting after that, and then you see her pivot and you’re like, oh, this is your calling.”

If her taste in music and scripts lines up, it’s because Gugino trusts her gut for the off-kilter. “I’ve always wanted to be a transformational actor, not just myself on screen,” she says. Which is how you end up being the mom in Spy Kids and the parole officer in Sin City, while ghosts trail you in Netflix mansions. “It took 20 years for people to stop being confused and start calling it a body of work,” she grins. “But hey, you stick around long enough and that’s what happens.”