Jane Adams stars in “Hung,” which kicks off its third season on HBO on Sunday.

PASADENA, Calif. — Ask actress Jane Adams how she landed in HBO’s modern fable “Hung” and she has no idea. Unlike most actresses, Adams doesn’t take credit for any of it.

“More and more in life I don’t think I did anything,” she said.

“Ever since I was a little girl I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of a collective unconscious. And I always felt like movies and plays and theater and television was reflecting back — at best — is reflecting back life.

“Why is that moving people has always fascinated me. I would say I don’t know why I’m doing this, I never did.”

She dropped out of two schools before she landed at Juilliard. The first was an acting institute in Seattle. “I finished a year of it. And I was too afraid to be an artist. I said, ‘I can’t do this.’ I said, ‘I don’t see how this is going to work out. I’m going to go to the University of Washington and study political science.’

“So I did that and pledged a sorority even, and I thought, ‘OK, I’m going to do this.’ And it lasted three months …”

She doesn’t even take credit for earning one of her first theater roles. “You never know where you’re going to find a mentor,” said Adams.

“One of my sorority sisters, this great girl, helped me learn my lines and get ready for an audition for a play in Seattle. And if she hadn’t been there to help … it was 11 monologues and I was the Pentecostal snake handler,” she said.

“My parents don’t do it. No one in my family did it. The closest I can come is it’s the opposite of saying I feel like I’ve been pushed, it’s more like I’m saying I really have NO idea why this is what I’ve done all these years.”

Though she collected lots of theater experience, which didn’t count for much when she came to Los Angeles. “They don’t care about that at all,” she said.

“But the good thing is they’re business men … If you don’t have the benefit of parents or grandparents from whom you can learn the ropes, it’s a shock. I wasted years. I could’ve been working more, I think, if I’d known how to better navigate that. I was very impulsive. ‘Oh, I don’t like L.A. because I don’t understand this. Business things scare me so I’ll run back to New York to do another play.’ Which, that’s maybe a good thing, but it wasn’t necessarily a choice.”

She earned a variety of roles in “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Happiness,” “Wonder Boys” and “Frasier,” before she landed the role of Tanya Skagle in “Hung.”

Even so, she said, “I don’t think they’ve changed their attitude about me. I think I just got really lucky.”

Though she sees herself as passive in an active world, Adams has undertaken some courageous steps in her life. Nine years ago she stopped drinking and smoking pot. “It was meeting a couple people who’d done that, and were more themselves. It was inspiring. I was 37. They just made me aware of the cause-and-effect nature of that kind of thing. Believe me, it was not me. It was seeing other people. It’s not like, ‘Oh, I’m so smart I figured it out.’ It was nothing, it was just kind of revealed to me.”

Then her mother became ill with cancer and died a month ago. “I think my mom’s illness didn’t change me as much as her recent death did. It significantly changed my outlook,” she said.

“Holding my mother’s hand and watching her take her last breath and being with her for days while she was dying, that death process, I feel if I ever had a child I might encourage her and I’d talk about my experience. I get it now why parents would encourage someone young to be a candy striper or go into a hospital and see what’s going on.”

She says she’s never married and isn’t eager to. “I’m not thinking I would like to, no. There was a time in my mid-30s where I thought I had to hurry up and do that thing. Now if I could talk to that woman I’d say, ‘Don’t worry about it. Go to Paris.”

“Hung” begins its third season Oct. 2.

‘Hung’

When: 10 p.m. Sunday

Where: HBO