There was a good decade and a half after Michelle Pfeiffer’s breakout performance in 1983’s Scarface when the actress was on a true Hollywood tear. She earned three Oscar nominations in a four-year span (for Dangerous Liaisons, The Fabulous Baker Boys, and Love Field). She spread her talents across costume (The Age of Innocence), romance (Frankie and Johnny), fantasy (The Witches of Eastwick), and comedy (Married to the Mob) genres. And in a rare feat for actors, she even managed to receive universal critical acclaim for her interpretation of an iconic character, Catwoman, in Batman Returns. But not long after that, Pfeiffer dropped off the radar in a self-imposed exile. In a new interview, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Darren Aronofsky—who recently directed Pfeiffer in a mysterious project called Mother!—goes so far as to call the film period sans Pfeiffer a “famine.”

But in their conversation for Interview, Aronofsky also gets Pfeiffer to confess why she dropped off the Hollywood radar—except for the occasional low-profile project she’d tackle every few years.

“I’ve never lost my love for acting,” Pfeiffer explains. “I’m a more balanced person, honestly, when I’m working. But I was pretty careful about where I shot, how long I was away, whether or not it worked out with the kids’ schedule. And I got so picky that I was unhireable. And then . . . I don’t know, time just went on . . . I disappeared, yeah.”

There was one perk to her disappearance from Hollywood, though: she didn’t have to do any interviews, which she hates.

“I was thinking today, ‘Why do I hate being interviewed so much?’” Pfeiffer tells Aronofsky. “And I think it may be that I have this constant fear that I’m a fraud and that I’m going to be found out . . . I started working fairly quickly, and I wasn’t ready.”

“I didn’t have any formal training,” the actress says of her speedy ascent from Orange County grocery clerk to beauty pageant winner to television actress to, just four years later, her Scarface breakout. “I didn’t come from Juilliard. I was just getting by and learning in front of the world. So I’ve always had this feeling that one day they’re going to find out that I’m really a fraud, that I really don't know what I’m doing.”

Now that her two children are grown and out of the house, though, Pfeiffer has decided to return to the screen with a flurry of projects, including HBO’s upcoming Bernie Madoff movie, The Wizard of Lies (in which Pfeiffer plays Ruth Madoff); the mysterious Aronofsky project Mother!, which co-stars Jennifer Lawrence and Javier Bardem; and Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of the Agatha Christie classic Murder on the Orient Express co-starring Johnny Depp and Penelope Cruz.

Although still uncertain about interviews, Pfeiffer seems confident that the time is finally right for her onscreen comeback, saying, “When the student is ready, the teacher appears. I’m more open now, my frame of mind, because I really want to work now, because I can. And these last few years I’ve had some really interesting opportunities.”