Mireille Enos on dressing up and learning the rules of Shondaland

TORONTO – Playing a tough-as-nails investigator is nothing new to Mireille Enos, who catapulted to fame as brooding Seattle cop Sarah Linden on “The Killing.”

But tackling the role in designer heels? That was a switch, the Houston native says with a chuckle during a phone interview from Los Angeles.

The 40-year-old Enos plays the carefully coiffed private investigator Alice Vaughan on the new series “The Catch,” which comes from super-producers Shonda Rhimes and Betsy Beers, also behind the female-fuelled “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Scandal” and “How to Get Away with Murder.”

It premieres Thursday on ABC and CTV.

Vaughan is beautiful, brilliant, confident and successful, but — spoiler alert — she’s blindsided when she discovers she’s been conned by the person she trusted the most, her fiance, played by Peter Krause.

Enos spoke with The Canadian Press and mused on her glammed-up makeover, filling in character details and navigating the rules of Shondaland.

— On donning designer duds: “It’s the shiniest thing I’ve ever done,” Enos says of her slick new series, packed with beautiful people in beautiful clothes.

“It’s new territory but it’s been really, really fun. I guess for whatever reason I usually have done things that are a little grittier…. You know, ‘World War Z’ there was a high quality of production value and everything but it was still about zombies, so it was scrappy. And this is just really shiny and slick and it’s fun. It’s a new rhythm for me.”

— The rules of Shondaland: “It was funny, we had a background person the other day in a park and she had some romance novel she was just sitting and reading. And somebody spotted it and they were like, ‘No, no, no, no, no! Not in Shondaland! Women have to do smart things in Shondaland. You are not allowed to read a romance novel!’ And so they put an iPad in her hand instead.”

— The wonders of Alice: “There’s actually not a lot of time to deal with her back story because what’s happening in her current life is so consuming (but) I said, ‘Well, I still need something for myself to go on so I’m just going to create a story for myself and it doesn’t have to be relevant to anyone, it just will help me on a day-to-day basis.”

A big issue was reconciling Alice’s street smarts with her refined style.

“I needed to explain why she’s such a toughie and I imagined that she had grown up Midwest somewhere and she was a little bit of a wild child. She had her own kind of lock-picking and driving-stolen-cars moment in her life when she was a teenager. And then ultimately she moved to L.A. and was a stunt girl, just to kind of pay the bills while she figured out what she really wanted to do with herself.”

— The legacy of “The Killing”:

“I know in the pilot season after ‘The Killing’ opened my manager would say, ‘I just read three scripts that have ponytail-wearing female detectives.’ And that’s true about any story that’s successful. Other people then say, ‘Whoa, let’s capitalize on this style.’ But I don’t know how many of those ever went to series.”

Enos says the small screen seems full of diverse roles for women.

“There’s an ongoing conversation in Hollywood about how women’s roles aren’t equal to men’s and there’s just so many fewer and blah, blah, blah and that’s true. That is true. But in my experience, (television) is where women are being written for, really strong interesting female leads that are just as powerful as their male counterparts.”