TORONTO—You don’t generally find yourself with four Oscar nominations and two Golden Globes by going with safe, one-dimensional characters. And Annette Bening never has.

From her sultry, star-making work as a con artist in Grifters to her landmark performance in American Beauty to her return to prominence, after a spare period, in The Kids Are All Right, the veteran actor has played some memorably difficult characters. With The Face of Love, Bening doesn’t break the trend: she plays a widow who meets her deceased husband’s doppelgänger, subsequently pursuing a relationship with him. (Ed Harris plays both men.)

Speaking with a couple of reporters in a hotel room during the last Toronto International Film Festival, Bening was eager to talk about the film. She approached each question calmly and carefully but couldn’t help getting excited at times, the sudden projection of her voice from whisper to lion’s roar an obvious clue to her theatre-heavy past. Bening was clearly heavily invested in this one.

“It was a fascinating journey,” she began. “I don’t know what it is, but the more I’m working now, I feel like I get more immersed than ever in what I’m doing. I found myself completely in this woman’s brain.”

It’s a delicate role and Bening knows it, but it’s not as if she hasn’t played vulnerable women before. Carolyn Burnham in American Beauty is going through an especially tough midlife crisis, and Nic in The Kids Are All Right is on the verge of losing her family. Watching her in The Face of Love is a different experience, however. Her Nikki is a seemingly normal woman who slowly slips into an unstable state.

“That word, vulnerability, is so important to me to try to find a way to be open,” Bening continued, her volume gradually rising so much that the nearby construction workers in Dundas Square might have been able to hear her over the roar of their drills. “And it’s interesting because you would think, as an actor, that’s your job and that’s something you do. But even sometimes when you say to yourself, ‘Okay, I really want to be open here,’ there’s something in the psyche that says: ‘Well, maybe you shouldn’t. You’re vulnerable that way.’ But that is certainly what I was trying to do, was to find a way to, as best I could, imaginatively enter that point of view and just try to experience it and experience what it would be like to go through what this woman is going through.”

As a studio executive tried to pull her away, Bening resisted, asking reporters for one more question. She wanted to keep talking about her performance, and so might you.