the role challenging on an emotional level, comparing the experience to "getting a jail sentence and you're expected to go along with it without any explanation" or "the gods messing with somebody with no reason but to mess with them". When asked to describe Eve in three words, Ross responded that she was a "contradiction inside an enigma". Playing Eve, she said, was "as if somebody came and told you that your closest friend is doing abominable things". Ross appreciated Eve's characterization as a human being who was not portrayed as completely good or bad and had admirable qualities as well as faults. She later connected Eve's shame of her past life with Julian and inability to tell her family to Lavinia Kingsley's regrets about her youth in the 2002 comedy film The Banger Sisters. In an interview with The Atlas Society, Ross related that her approach to Eve was inspired by Ayn Rand's objectivist philosophy. She said that Eve was "always willing to make sacrifices, and there's always somebody willing, as Ayn Rand said, to take any sacrifices you might be willing to make." She compared Eve to Catherine Halsey in Rand's 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, particularly around the middle of the novel, before Catherine "was completely destroyed". Ross described Eve as "a self-sacrificing animal", and emphasized that her character was distinct from her own self-identification as an individualist. Ross said that her portrayal of Eve was also influenced by Eve White, a character with dissociative identity disorder played by Joanne Woodward in the 1957 film The Three Faces of Eve. The actress researched books on sociopaths and psychopaths to help her approach Eve's desire to hide her past at any cost. During the filming process, she kept a diary to help her better understand how to approach future scenes. Ross also used the 2001 novel Hidden Passions: Secrets from the Diaries of Tabitha Lenox to inform her interpretation of Eve's past. She was surprised Eve's relationship with Julian was a "real short courtship" that turned her character from "the innocent girl to the woman on the Studio 54 dance floor having sex". After adjusting her perception of Eve's past, Ross chose to play the character's descent into drugs and prostitution as "more immediate, wild[,] and impulsive" and "very untamed and unrestrained". Relationships Early in the show, the actress based her understanding of Eve on the character's relationships with