Queen Sugar is wowing fans with its current fifth season, and the avid fanbase was something Dawn-Lyen Gardner is thankful for. Shadow And Act’s Jessica Otse Idaewor caught up with Gardner about what it’s been like to work on five seasons of the hit OWN show. Gardner called the experience “surreal.”

“I did not expect to be at this point. When we first started the show, it was a wing and a prayer and a hope that the show would resonate,” she said. “It was not necessarily a guarantee and it was such a different style of storytelling in terms of just the dimension and depth we were going for. But I’m so grateful and glad that it did resonate.”

During the fourth season, her character Charley Bordelon West had to weather a storm prompted by a tell-all book released by Nova (Rutina Wesley). Gardner said that the storyline presented her with a lesson about healing.

“I think [Charley] taught me a lot about the unexpected opportunities of healing. That’s what happened with Nova’s book. It was painful, it was challenging…then Charlie had to make a decision. Was she going to heal the things that were there to be healed that Nova named? Was she going to put [the] pieces back together and was she going to make herself anew?” she said. “I feel like that’s my most recent lesson. How do I embrace something that’s very painful, very hard, very challenging, and embrace the opportunity of it, embrace the gift of it, embrace the part of it that’s asking me to grow and expand deeper and wider.”

Check out the full interview below:

Queen Sugar airs Tuesdays at 8 p.m. ET on OWN.