You may have never heard of Daniela Sea, but after the third season of The L Word premieres on Showtime on Jan. 8, she's going to become a household name. As the new recurring character, Moira, who falls in love with Jenny Schechter (Mia Kirshner), Sea promises to bring a butch sensibility to the show that has been criticized for playing it too safe on the genderqueer spectrum.

And if any actress should know their way around the complex politics of queer identity, it's Sea. The daughter of a gay father and raised in a liberal, hippie family, Sea came out when she was a teenager and soon moved to San Francisco, where she began playing in punk bands. As an adult, she backpacked extensively through Europe and Central Asia, going so far as to pass as a man while traveling through India.

Prior to her stint on The L Word, Sea was probably best known for being the significant other of indie musician and artist Bitch (formerly of Bitch and Animal, now known as Capital B, and pictured with Sea in the photo above, right). We talked to her the day after she returned to the New York apartment she shares with Bitch, following a whirlwind six months on the set of The L Word.

AfterEllen: How did you come to get this role on The L Word?
Daniela Sea : For a lot of years I've just been concentrating on traveling and writing and music…and about a year and a half ago I started taking my acting seriously. I had studied it when I was younger, at Laney College in Oakland. I'd run away from home when I was 16 and moved out there.

AE: You ran away from home?
DS: Yeah, I ran away when I was 16 from L.A. and I moved to the Bay area, like a good gay kid would. I took my GED and I started studying at Laney College, and I had this great improv teacher, Lou. It was so cool, because it really was a great learning environment for me because I responded well to being in a really diverse class. There were single moms and senior citizens and people my age, and all different cultural backgrounds. It was really cool, so I really enjoyed it.

But I think growing up in L.A., I had this feeling that being who I was—you know, being such a tomboy, basically—why would I think I could…pursue acting? At the same time I was involved at the Gilman Street Project in Berkeley. We did some theater stuff… but mostly it was music. I was also a musician, so I started playing in a band and then I started touring and I kind of left the acting thing behind, although I did do a lot of street theater in my coming years in Europe.

AE: What kind of musician are you?
DS: I played in some different punk bands. I played in a San Francisco band, The Cipher in the Snow, it was an all-women band. And I played in a band called the Gr'ups—we're actually doing a reunion in the spring, which is really cool. That was a punk band out of Gilman, and we toured in Europe and the U.S., and I ended up staying over in Europe. I did some street theater stuff, and I traveled with a Polish circus, and I just really lived a pretty different life than what I grew up seeing around me. And that's what I'd always dreamed of, so that was great for a lot of years.

Then I ended up back in New York [due to] a lot of different circumstances, and while I was here I just realized that I'd been missing this thing [acting] that I loved so much.… So I just [began] letting everyone know that's what I was doing now. Basically I just said, OK, I'm an actor, and…it just felt to me, now, that there was a place for a person like me in movies and TV. It just seems like so much has opened up for queer people, you know?

So I followed my heart. And a few weeks after letting people know, I got this audition for John Cameron Mitchell's coming film [Shortbus], which will be coming out in February. I got called back a few times and I ended up getting the part, and that was great because it was so part of my culture and scene, and it was a good…introduction into the film world, because that's something I really believed in; I really saw his vision. I really loved the people I worked with, and it was a real communal feeling. Actually a lot of the script was based on improvisation, and…it was really exciting. We workshopped that for a while, and he came up with a script, and then we started shooting it the following year, which would be last spring.