Agents Of SHIELD: Elizabeth Henstridge On Simmons' Evolution

01/10/2017 04:57 pm EST

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD has been full of changes for many of the show's key characters, but perhaps none more than Simmons. After the trials and trauma that Simmons has experienced in the series so far, she's become a bit more physically capable in the field, which is quite the change from the lab rat introduced in the series premiere.

"It's amazing," Elizabeth Henstridge, who plays Simmons, tells ComicBook.com. "I think, as an actor, you always want to be able to have the most growth in your character and have the biggest journey to go on and the thing with TV is that you never know where your journey is going to go. In a movie, you now where your journey is going to end. It's exciting. We get the scripts the day before we film the episode, so we never know either.

"I love where Simmons is right now. She's strong. She's still much better intellectually than she is physically. She's still her essence, but she's come a long way."

Simmons has also gotten a bit of promotion and now acts as the chief scientific advisor to new SHIELD director Jeffrey Mace.

"I really enjoy it," Henstridge says. "She's had some really good scenes with May where she's kind of had to say, 'I'm pulling rank and my rank's above yours," which was really fun to film. But I think they know why she's doing it, that she wanted to get as close to the new director as possible just so that she'd have the inside info and could be able to protect them from the inside. So they know why she's doing it, but sometimes she definitely loves the power play just because."

But Simmons also has a workplace romance to worry about with other half, Agent Leo Fitz.

"There's stuff that she can't tell him, and there's stuff that he maybe doesn't want her to know because he knows that she is obliged to tell everything to the director, so it definitely puts a conflict into their relationship."

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Marvel's Agents of SHIELD airs Tuesdays at 10 p.m. ET on ABC.