He may be best-known for playing the charmingly slack-jawed Delmar O'Donnell in O Brother Where Art, Thou, but Tulsa-born actor Tim Blake Nelson is far from simple. Just ask anyone who caught the complex and brilliant play about the Greek orator Socrates he wrote and debuted at New York’s Public Theater earlier this year.

The actor returned to his roots this Sunday playing a character he calls “an Okie right down to the handlebar mustache” in the premiere of HBO’s comic book adaptation Watchmen. His character, Looking Glass, gets a compelling debut in the premiere where not only his distinctive look, but his uncanny skills as a human lie detector are on display. But the role also has profound depths which Nelson has a chance to fully explore in a mid-season episode dedicated almost entirely to his character.

It’s the first of three times Nelson will be a scene-stealer this fall. He has supporting roles in two major fall films: Destin Daniel Cretton’s death row drama Just Mercy, out in late December, and Scott Z. Burns’ examination of post-9/11 torture tactics The Report which opens wide November 15th.

All three projects share an examination of the damage of long-lasting trauma, and, in this post-fact world, the value of a dogged pursuit of truth. Nelson plays an interrogator of sorts in both Watchmen and The Report, and the interrogated—a prisoner who is also a key witness in exonerating an innocent man— in Just Mercy. As Nelson explains to Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast, he didn’t exactly set out to make three projects with so much thematic overlap, but their similarities aren’t exactly a coincidence either. He discusses the challenges of tacking real-life figures, acting under his reflective Watchmen mask, and why showrunner Damon Lindelof both expanded the character of Looking Glass just for Nelson and completely re-wrote his origin story after seeing, exactly, what the actor could do. You can listen to the entire interview, as well as a breakdown of all the references in the Watchmen premiere, here:

What Cretton, Burns, and Lindelof all have in common, Nelson says, is an interest in stories with a finger directly on the pulse of what matters to our culture today. “When I do turn down movies,” he says, “it’s often because they don’t feel current or uniquely visionary, or challenging in ways that feel irresistible.” Both Just Mercy and The Report take place in our own, recent past while Watchmen plays in a present-day shaped by alternative history laid out in the pages of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ beloved graphic novel.

Though it was written over a decade before 9/11, the Watchmen comic that sets the stage for Lindelof’s sequel series ends with a massive terrorist attack on New York (by an alien squid!) that is manufactured in order to keep the populace and their governments in line. That book questioned whether we should let a lie told by the powerful for the greater good of the general public stand. But in Lindelof’s show, Nelson says, “there is an unambiguous pursuit of how the revelation of truth and the solving of mystery and exposure of mystery is ultimately for all of our benefit.”

Nelson is possessed of the kind of rubbery, nimble features any character actor dreams of, stretching into gormless credulity or slit-eyed cunning at will. But for much of Watchmen, Nelson had to work without his most flexible tool. His face is often either completely or mostly obscured by a stretchy, reflective mask challenging the actor to convey the deep-seated trauma of his character—a survivor of the New York squid attack—through body language alone.

The story of Looking Glass, which dominates most of the fifth episode of the season, is one Lindelof re-wrote specifically for Nelson after the actor had already starting filming the series. Though Nelson only heard about it when he was filming Episode 3—in other words after he had started shaping his character— he relished the challenge this new story would bring. “[Lindelof] came up with what’s probably better for the story as a whole,” Nelson says, “because it’s a more understandably pervasive and universal fear that this guy is traumatized by having been there when the squid attack happened—the big one.”

Nelson said that while actors generally have an instinct to go broad and almost cartoonish with their gestures when working under masks, he found power in playing as much stillness as he could. “With the anonymity, you can get away with more, and because so much of you becomes inscrutable, people are more afraid of you and they yield status to you. And that just happened immediately in scenes and I found myself having to do less as a character.”

In Just Mercy, Nelson worked with another mask of sorts. The real-life character he plays, an inmate and key witness named Ralph Myers, was caught in a fire as a child which left him disfigured by heavy scarring. Without spoiling the plot of the film, those burns are a key element of the story and so had to be incorporated into Nelson’s performance. He achieved the look—which you can see on display in the film’s trailer—with minimal makeup and mostly by contorting his own features into a tortured grimace. It’s an effect that’s jarring at first and, eventually, heartbreaking.

But no mask or makeup or, in the case of the paranoia-infused The Report, shadowy parking lot can hide Nelson’s most identifiable feature: his unmistakable southern-friend drawl. The actor comes by it honestly having grown up in Oklahoma—where Watchmen is set—but it has always made him a standout in an industry where everyone is trying to sound like they came from one coast or another.

In his real life, the accent has worked as another kind of mask that Nelson can wear in order to, Watchmen-like, discover ugly truths lurking under the surface in America. “I’m Jewish,” he explains, “but my name is Tim Blake Nelson, and I play all these hick roles. But I’m very. . .I’m Jewish—Jewish. Actually, we did Ancestry.com and I’m a hundred percent Ashkenazi Jewish. But since I have this name and I’m from Oklahoma and I play these roles, I hear a lot of anti-Semitism, because nobody fucking thinks I’m Jewish. And all you have to do is read on the internet, I don’t hide it. And that’s been interesting.”

All of which makes Nelson’s character the perfect counterpart to Regina King’s Detective Angela, Abar as the pair separately and together try to infiltrate and penetrate the layers of corruption, bigotry, and lies that make up Watchmen’s fictional America. It’s a world that, though set in an alternate comic book universe, often feels more authentically and brutally honest than the world we live in now.