Ellen Burstyn is good at talking.

Seated in her living room overlooking Central Park on a brisk February afternoon, a wire-haired pooch perched at her feet, Burstyn registers as thoughtful, engaged and exceedingly well-read. Cluttered bookshelves line the walls. Crystals garnish the windowsill near our armchairs. A white piano sits across the room. Art from all corners of the globe hangs throughout her apartment, evincing an 85-year-old life full of adventures.

As quickly as we delve into the annals of her career from an auspicious Broadway debut to defining roles in The Last Picture Show, Alice Doesnt Live Here Anymore, The Exorcist, Requiem for a Dream, Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Interstellar and House of Cards the conversation shifts to Burstyns spiritual fortification. Shes as infatuated with the cosmos and metaphysical ideology as she is anything to do with Hollywood, where she has gone from primo leading lady to venerated elder stateswoman.

In the next several weeks, Burstyn will appear in two movies: The House of Tomorrow (opening April 27) and The Tale (premiering May 26 on HBO). In the former, shes an environmentally conscious grandmother obsessed with Buckminster Fuller, an architect and theorist who popularized the term Spaceship Earth (and a real-life friend of Burstyns; more on that later). In the latter, which was one of the most renowned films at Sundance this year, shes a mother whose globetrotting daughter (Laura Dern) is reinvestigating a sexually abusive episode from her childhood. Onscreen, Burstyn has always had a crisp elocution that wobbles only to reveal characters vulnerability a trait seen in both The House of Tomorrow and The Tale.

For an hour, Burstyn and I had a conversation so articulate and wide-ranging we must have solved at least some of the worlds problems. We discussed the state of American politics, her Vietnam War protests in the 1970s, the injury she sustained on The Exorcist, the evolution of Hollywood and, yes, the mysteries of the universe.