There's a great little moment in the movie when Christine's boss says to her: "You know what your problem is, Chubbuck? You're a feminist."

"It was such a dirty word. In some circles it still is. I'm always shocked when people — when women — say, 'Oh, I wouldn't call myself a feminist but...' Because if you vote, you're a feminist. If you do pretty much anything in our society now, post-suffragette, you're a feminist. So own it. We have to own it."

Was there added pressure with this role because of the responsibility to play someone real, known for something rather dark?

"It's a complicated thing because there's not a lot of stuff about her. What she did was infamous. But we don't know an awful lot about the person. [Screenwriter] Craig Shilowich did go to Sarasota, Florida and research [her through] co-workers, friends, people who knew her. But then he also had to release himself from that and create a response to something that is primarily unknown, because the real things we'd like to know went to the grave with her.

"Someone that's severely depressed — what they reveal to people is very complicated. So, yes and no, in answer to your question: What I acted was Craig Shilowich's creation, that he wrote, and what he wrote was a combination of what he knew about a person who was real and who did this thing, and also what he knew about depression from his own personal experience. When he came across the story of Christine Chubbuck on the internet — a five-line reductive sentence saying "most shocking" whatever it was — he had this profound reaction to it. It wasn't shock and horror. It was: Imagine if I had been that person. Imagine if I had been going through what I was going through, but a woman in the '70s, in a hostile work environment.

"The film opens up the story to a more universal context, because it asks all of us to confront how arbitrary it is: gender, brain chemistry, social time and place. The things that could turn what is having a bad day or what is feeling depressed for a couple of days — all the calamities that life throws to us — to tragedy."