Gemma Arterton doesn’t mind being indoors. “You can just get cozy,” she joked during a call with W from her home in London. During the city’s second official pandemic lockdown, the actress has spent her time devouring books (Revolutionary Road was a recent favorite) and contemplating what she’d be like as a director (a “really anxious” one, she guesses). But she’s also been examining her participation in a project that’s been a long time coming: her starring role in Black Narcissus, a mini-series remake of the Oscar-winning epic from 1947, based on Rumer Godden’s novel of the same name.

In the three-part series, which airs its final chapter tonight on FX, Arterton plays Sister Clodagh, a self-flagellating Anglican nun tasked with leading her order to the Himalayas and bringing a divine presence to a formerly hedonistic palace. While she’s there, she finds herself reminiscing—against her own will to employ the most self-control a person could possibly exert—on her past in Ireland, before she cut off her hair, donned a wimple, and started practicing custody of the eyes (averting one’s gaze to maintain pure, chaste thoughts).

But it’s so hard to look away when in the presence of the majestic Himalayan landscape, the Sisters soon learn. The panoramic mountain view is, after all, what really secured the original film as a Technicolor masterpiece, and as actors in the remake, the cast experienced that firsthand, Arterton said. After countless flights and long drives, the cast and crew finally arrived at their filming destination in Nepal last year, to witness the natural terrain that causes the nuns in the story to somewhat lose their minds. “You understand why the nuns were so taken by the beauty of the place,” the actress told me. “Because it really is so pure. It’s so untampered with and so fresh, and because you’re so high up you can quite get quite delirious up there.”