Dana Delany is known for playing strong women on screens big and small. From her time on Desperate Housewives to her new role as Dr. Megan Hunt on ABC’s Body of Proof, Delany knows how important it is for young girls to have positive women to look up to.

Delany, who is a spokesperson for Caltrate’s Women Who Move The World nitiative to benefit Susan G. Komen for the Cure, talked to Parade.com about the upcoming season of Body of Proof and whether fans can expect to see her back on Wisteria Lane.

On being an unexpected role model for young girls.
“I find strong women interesting because they tend to be complicated. I have a strong following of young girls who I give advice to, especially on Twitter, which I never expected. I didn’t realize how hungry they were for a female role model. There are girls who want to know that it’s ok not to get married and it’s ok not to have children. We all have these stereotypes of what’s expected, and I think it’s been helpful for them to hear about somebody who went their own way. I feel like I’ve forged my own path”

On her new role on Body of Proof.
“I was sort of the new guy on the block with Desperate Housewives and they very nicely took me in. But I’ve been part of Body of Proof from the beginning, so there’s more responsibility. It’s all about creating a new show. We’re a very close-knit group. Having been on several shows, I take a lot of responsibility for being the captain of the ship and making sure everybody’s happy.”

On the unique challenges of doing a medical show.
“The main one is having to say all those words and act like you know what you’re talking about. Most of the words make no sense at all to me. Having an iPad really helps because I can look it up the night before while I’m reading the script and see a picture of what I’m talking about and I can make sense of it. But it has gotten easier with each episode.”

On her upcoming big screen role opposite 50 Cent in Freelancers.
“All my scenes were with 50 Cent and it was a blast. I was very impressed with him. He’s an entrepreneur, and he’s a producer on the film. He made it happen. He really wants to be taken seriously as an actor and I think he’s really good. He’s got a lot of charisma.”

On the possibility of returning to Desperate Housewives.
“I would love that. I would really love to go back for the final season for a little visit as Katherine because I’d like to resolve her storyline. I would like to know that she and her girlfriend Robin were living happily ever after. It would be nice if they ended up together or she at least found some happiness in her life.”

On the importance of finding “me” time despite her busy schedule.
“It’s been a bit tough this year because I do work five days a week and 12-15 hour days. I think one of the things that women need to learn is to say ‘no.’ It’s ok to say no once in awhile.”

Forget the makeup, the blowouts, the Jimmy Choos. These TV stars know that when it comes to looking good, it’s how you feel on the inside that matters most.

Dana Delany, Age 55

Her character on Body of Proof was written for a 35-year-old. But it was Delany, 55, who got the job. How did she defy Hollywood’s ageism? By liking who she is.

Real beauty is…

Being quiet. That’s what I do. I remind myself to just sit and be still. The older I get, the more I find beauty in stillness. I’ll sit by my window for a half hour and look out at the world around me. There’s too much talking and too many electronics vying for our attention. It really helps to remove yourself from the noise.

How I nurture myself…

I eat lots of fish and vegetables. I go to yoga every morning, so that sets the tone for my day. I’ve also learned it’s good to have a support system of women friends. When I was younger I wouldn’t want to bother anybody. I would be too embarrassed to ask for help. Now I’ve learned that people really do want to help you and they’re honored if you call them up. It’s okay to rely on people, so I have a group of friends I can call at any hour of the day or night and say, “Could I just complain for a second?”

Feeling good in my 50s…

I’m so happy I’m this age because when I was in my 20s I would have worried for months about having my photo taken for the cover of a magazine; I would have dieted and worked out. I would have been miserable. Now I look how I look. It is what it is and I just accept it. The idea that wisdom comes with age is true. Aging is all about harnessing that self-love. I’ll see pictures of myself when I was in my 30s and remember how hard I was on myself at that time. I feel for that girl. Now I think, “You looked fine! What were you worried about?” I also find that the less I focus on the external, the more attractive I am. When you stop thinking about what you look like you naturally look better.

The downside of beauty…

I’ve never been a bombshell. I’ve always been sort of natural, all-American. Whenever I’ve tried to mess with nature or fix something cosmetically, it always backfired. Years ago I had never heard of Botox. My dermatologist said, “You should try it.” He injected my forehead, hit a nerve and created a huge hematoma. The nerve has been dead ever since. It affected the muscles in my right eye, so my eye droops a bit. I’ve taken it as a sign that I should just leave well enough alone and be grateful. I don’t judge people for having plastic surgery because the end goal is to feel better about yourself. But for me I feel like God has His own plan. I don’t mean that in a religious way, but if you go to a plastic surgeon, you’re ultimately going to look like his image of what you should look like. I have this fear that if I did something like that, I’d look in the mirror and go, “That’s not me!”

I feel beautiful when…

I’m in nature, with bare feet, no makeup and being at one with the elements. Sometimes that means just sitting in my backyard looking up at the palm trees. That’s heaven to me.

Dana Delany is returning to ABC with Body of Proof, where she works on dead people. After a car accident hinders her ability to operate, Dr. Megan Hunt is forced to start a new career as a coroner. Delany dishes on the new medical series, which felt like home for the China Beach alum. Plus, find out if Nathan Fillion will make his way to her new show.

Check out photos of Body of Proof

5. What makes this series stand out?
Delany: We do have the mystery every week, which is something people like. We have a bit more character going on. We’ve got the office politics, which can be very humorous. I think Geoffrey Arend and Windell Middlebrooks are like Abbott and Costello together, or Laurel and Hardy. They’ve very funny together. There’s also a lot of tension with my boss, played by Jeri Ryan.

4. Your character comes off as a stoic, strong female. Is there a softer side to her?
Delany: I feel like, underneath it all, she’s in great pain. People say, “Well, why is she so combative?” I think she doesn’t really know how to behave with people. Her whole life has been about going to school and being a success. Now she’s having to be in the world of human beings, oddly surrounded by dead people. She’s learning, from these dead people, to have respect for the living.

3. Can she find love around so much death?
Delany: People have asked whether Peter Dunlop (played by Nicholas Bishop), my medical investigator, and I will get together. At first, I was like, “Why? Why can’t they just be friends?” My best friend is a guy, so I don’t understand always wanting to hook people up, but I know people like that tension. We do have a very dashing FBI agent coming on for the end of the season, played by Cliff Curtis, and he’s going to be a love interest for me. He’s an old friend, so I wanted him for the role.

Will you be watching the Body of Proof series premiere? Tell us here

2. As the promos say, Hunt lost her daughter to her job and then she lost her job. What will we see from that?
Delany: Joanna Cassidy is coming in as my mother, so you’re going to see these three generations of strong women who don’t really give each other an inch. I think you’ll understand where Megan comes from once you meet her mother.

1. You have previous medical roles, having played a nurse on China Beach, so was it easy to pick it all up again?
Delany: I do like the medical roles, but I like the whole life-and-death aspect to it. But this one in particular was tough because I went and observed the autopsies and I certainly got that down. But it was the terminology that was the hardest. You have 10-syllable words that make no sense to you whatsoever. There’s a phenomenon that happens when you get on camera: You know the words, you know what it means, you know how to pronounce it, but the minute the camera starts rolling on you, you cannot remember a thing. It’s like white noise.

Bonus Round: You have worked with Nathan Fillion three times (He played her husband on Desperate Housewives, her lover in Pasadena, and Richard Castle against her FBI agent Jordan Shaw on Castle.) Might he appear on your show?
Delany: I would love it. I suggested it on Twitter that Mr. Castle should come to our coroner’s office to investigate something; maybe he’s writing a book about a medical investigator. I think that would be really fun!

We’re off to start our “Reunite Fillion and Delany” campaign. Hit the comments with your thoughts on Body of Proof.

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Television veteran Dana Delany makes no apologies for her polarizing character on the upcoming ABC drama Body of Proof. In fact, she loves the fact that the “psychically tortured” former neurosurgeon-turned-medical-examiner she plays, Dr. Megan Hunt, is intelligent and flawed. At least, Dr. Hunt’s life certainly is flawed: She gets divorced from her husband, loses her daughter in a custody battle, and gets into a life-altering car accident. It will hopefully make for character-driven TV on a should-have-been “CBS-type” procedural, she says.In a chat with EW, Delany talks more about her new show’s initial expectations, the undeniable House and Bones similarities, and its eventual evolution into something she hopes will resonate with TV viewers when it premieres March 29 at 10 p.m. on ABC.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So I watched the pilot, and I found Dr. Hunt to be what can only be described as a painfully intelligent person. Ha. What did you like about role?
DANA DELANY: Oh, Gosh. I did like that she was smart. I’m sort of laughing inside hearing you say that about “painfully intelligent,” because that’s exactly how I see her. I just got off the phone with a male reporter who found her annoying. [Laughs] And I laughed because I said to him, “You know what, only men say that.” I never once had a female have that reaction to the character, and I find that very interesting because I think it’s gender-oriented. I don’t usually think of things in that way — because I think people are human beings more than they’re men and women — but it’s been an interesting reaction that I’ve gotten. I think that “painfully intelligent” is the right description because I’ve seen it happen. It’s hard when you’re the smartest person in the room. You get impatient with people because you know the answer, and that person in school that was always raising their hand first, they can be annoying! [Laughs] People have compared the character to Dr. House, but I think that her crutch, as it were, is not a cane or drugs. It’s that she’s psychically wounded.

Interesting comparison.
She was raised to be a very successful, intelligent brain surgeon, who, in her family, was rewarded by professional success. So most of her life was spent in her head, literally operating on heads, and to the detriment of losing her husband and her daughter. Then she has the car accident, and she can no longer do what she did well and was successful at. [It] was how she defined herself. I think it’s an interesting crossroads of who is she now. Where does she find meaning in her life? In an odd way, through working on these dead bodies, she’s learning how to feel for the first time.

I’m glad you brought up her family because it’s not common for a female character to be so void of that maternal connection. But on the show, your character is very estranged from her young daughter.
I thought it was great. I relate to that because I was raised by a working mother. My whole family was raised to be workers. I’m a worker — I love to work. It’s what makes me happy. When you’re raised like that, I think you really don’t know how to be a mother. Nobody taught you. You didn’t get a lot of mothering, so you don’t know how to be a mother — I think that she’s not a very good mother, that’s all. And not everybody is. Not every woman is meant to be a mother, and we’re not allowed to admit that, you know? I don’t find myself very maternal, and yet, I’m fiercely protective of people, which is different. So I think that she is learning from her daughter. It’s almost like her daughter is parenting her.

So you think that the fact that she’s not maternal is what’s polarizing about her? It just fascinates me that a male reporter you spoke to said that.
And he’s not the first! It’s been very, very interesting. And women like that she’s sassy, they like that she kind of has an attitude, and I think that it’s an interesting problem for men.

Now, speaking more generally about the show, it’d be easy to say this is procedural, but I found myself more attracted to the character aspect. Which part of it do you like?
I like the character stuff. I like the science because I find it interesting myself. I personally love science, and I love learning about stuff like that. I find that kind of fascinating. But when it came to the script, I understood the character stuff, so they let me have a lot of input on that. I think ABC in the beginning wanted a medical procedural because they didn’t really have that. I mean, they have their medical shows, like Grey’s Anatomy and Private Practice, but they didn’t have a procedural. So they wanted more of a CBS-type show. In the beginning, they were making us end every act with a procedural moment, some kind of clue, and what was nice by the end of the 13 episodes was that they started to trust that you can end it with a character moment, and that that would carry the show through the commercial, and that that would hold your interest. So I feel like by the end of the 13, we really found a nice balance between the mystery and the character.

I’m glad to hear that because everyone knows that pilots really set the tone, but I like that it makes that shift.
Yes, yes. Which is what I love about television, that you keep developing it.

Did you enjoy where it ended up more than there it started?
Yes, I did. I mean, I always like pilots because they’re always very crisp, and you kind of just commit to it and hope for the best. But by the end, I feel that we found different nuances and I think that Megan becomes much more vulnerable. I mean, she really goes places emotionally by the end of 13.

In a weird way, the character really struck me as similar to Temperance Brennan in the early seasons of Bones. Do you watch that?
You know, it’s funny you say that because I actually optioned those books years ago, the Kathy Reichs books. I had dinner with Kathy in North Carolina, God, 11 years ago [and talked with her] about doing them as a series of TV movies — like doing a three in a row kind of thing. We never got a script that we liked, and the option ran out. Then somebody else got the rights and kind of refigured it. You know, I was thinking more closely to the books, which are much darker, and [the character] was an ex-alcoholic and older than Emily Deschanel. So it’s smart what they did. They made it more right for a series. I think it’s interesting what they did to the books and lightened it a little bit, made it its own for the series. But I definitely love that character. That is a great character.

You can see so much of her in this character — what you’re bringing to it.
It’s a classic, you know. It’s become, I’d say, in the last 20 years, classic. Kay Scarpetta and Temperance — those are more modern female characters, I’d say.

How would you say this character evolves in the first 13 episodes, and what are we going to see as her goals this season?
To become more human. I think she’s letting these dead people teach her how to live. I think that’s the biggest thing in terms of character, that she’s learning to be vulnerable and admit that she might know everything in terms of her work, but that she doesn’t know anything about the human heart. You can’t really learn that, you just have to experience it. You can’t study that.

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