Her break in a cycle of violence

THERE is no awards season category for “Most Psychologically Beguiling Performance in a Grisly Horror Franchise,” but if there were, a statuette could easily go to actress Shawnee Smith.

A veteran performer -- she got her SAG card at age 8 -- Smith, now 36, has appeared in all three of the wildly successful “Saw” films, and as unlikely as it may sound, considers the series her “coming out” as a film actress

As Smith explains, she was being interviewed alongside her “Saw” costar Tobin Bell (who plays the evil mastermind Jigsaw) when she was asked a question about her personal oeuvre: “What else from your work

The “Saw” pictures are famous for Jigsaw’s traps, wildly ghastly and lethal contraptions that require wit and unusual personal insights to overcome. With each film they have become more elaborately distasteful -- one trap in “Saw III” involves a man chained in a pit that fills with liquefied pig entrails -- and viewers’ responses to the traps are emblematic of the love-it-or-hate-it attitude the “Saw” films seem to bring out of people.

Smith’s role in the first film in the series was shot in about a half-day. She did utter the line “He helped me,” however, in reference to Jigsaw’s nefarious scheming -- in her case a “reverse bear trap” mask -- and planted the seed for plot twists to come.

The second film -- in a surprise ending -- introduced Amanda as Jigsaw’s accomplice/apprentice.

Smith says that idea was only struck upon about a week prior to the end of shooting, so all of her seemingly revealing looks and telling inflections were just fortuitous coincidence, what she refers to as “the ‘Saw’ force.”

“Saw III” more fully explores the relationship between Amanda and Jigsaw, and Smith brings a bracing, fragile complexity to the role, which might now be seen as a portrait of a live-wire personality shorting out.

The latest film in the franchise adds shading and information to the back story of Smith’s character, fleshing out the viewer’s understanding of how she got where she is. The conviction behind Smith’s performance, which she sees as a necessity, is something that almost kept her from taking the role in the first place.

“I didn’t want to do it,” she says. “People talk about imagination like it has no substance, like it doesn’t exist. We look at a chair or a table and it’s real, but it started out with someone imagining it. So when I do a job like this, that’s what I get paid for: to use my imagination to conjure up those images.... To do that kind of material I’ve got to conjure some pretty awful imaginings. And they do have a certain substance. I read that first script and I said, ‘I don’t want to live this out for a day.’ And yet here I am on ‘Saw III.’ ”

Smith in person is friendly and warm with perhaps the slightly distracted air one might expect from this single mother of two. There is something of the reformed rock-and-roller about her, as her fuzzy house shoes are embroidered with a skull-and-crossbones pattern. She cheerfully disregards numerous protocols from the celebrity interview handbook by presenting a journalist visiting her Los Angeles area home with a lovely, noontime repast.

All of which makes her return to “Saw III” all the more startling.

Smith believes she would answer the call for a “Saw IV” if the project materializes.

For now, she hopes the attention and success of the “Saw” films will give her the momentum to be a part of other kinds of projects. Though she also appeared for numerous seasons in a kooky assistant role on the TV comedy “Becker,” Smith has some idea what it is that keeps landing her in darker horror roles.

“I go there,” she says. “I can’t fake it. I’d rather have hot needles poked in one eye. Making the ‘Saw’ films has been like being in a punk rock band in that way, you better throw everything into it. You better bring it. Otherwise it’s nothing.”

Pausing, she adds: “It sounds like I’m talking about my Academy Award-winning movie, right? This is a horror movie, I am aware of that.”