A bone scraper and a sausage piper surround Lizzy Caplan, and yet she is nowhere near the set of her show, "Masters of Sex." She is wearing jeans and open-toe sandals. This may have been a mistake, since she is walking into a refrigerator filled with dead pigs on hooks. It's a tight fit into the meat locker of Lindy & Grundys, a posh Los Angeles butcher shop, and one of her human shoulders brushes against a pork shoulder. Caplan lets out a small yelp.

"This is horrifying," she says with a grin. "I don't eat a lot of pig because the outside is the same color as the meat. You need that disconnect you get with beef."

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Caplan is here for a sausage-making class, and, a little later, she is introduced to the Dickeron, a swordlike knife-sharpening contraption. Her hair, in a Fifties bob for her Emmy-nominated role of sexologist Virginia Johnson, starts, well, bobbing up and down.

"Pretty soon, I'm going to be making my own sausage," says Caplan. She pauses, popping the giant greenish-gray eyes that have dominated multiple TV shows and movies that no one watched. "Once I get my own dick machine."
Caplan picked the sausage-making class for our meeting, and I joke that I felt a tad uncomfortable writing about a female kneading pork. "I'm making it difficult for you because you're going to have to figure out clever ways not to make innuendos about sausages," says Caplan. But wouldn't jokes be OK because she chose the place? Caplan gives me a withering stare. "I guess you could, but I'm expecting more from you."

It was hard to tell if she was kidding or not. This is a vibe Caplan gives off to the uninitiated. "Part of her shtick is to come across as cold and standoffish at first, but it's not at all what she's like," says Seth Rogen, who has known her since they were teenagers on "Freaks and Geeks" and who recently directed Caplan in the upcoming spy caper "The Interview." "Lizzy's very sweet once you get to know her. She has always played the smart, funny girl who cuts through the bullshit. That's much harder than what I do, playing dumb."

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In a way, the sausage-making conundrum is an apt metaphor for Caplan's career. (No, really.) At 32, Caplan is best known for playing the anti-manic pixie dream girl (see Zooey Deschanel and Kirsten Dunst) in a bushel of little-seen but hilarious enterprises – get ye online and watch the caterers on Vicodin in "Party Down" or 2012's girls-gone-wilding "Bachelorette" – where she's the snarky girl with a heart made of some metallic concoction that is not gold. It was a great life, but Caplan felt hemmed in as "that girl" and wondered if that was all Hollywood had for her.

And that's where sex came in. Caplan is winding up the second season of Showtime's "Masters of Sex," where she plays the research partner/lab partner/sex partner of Dr. William Masters as they delve into the study of sexual behavior during the 1950s. Eventually, their studies would land them fame, but the first years were harrowing, particularly for Johnson. There's more than a little of Caplan in Johnson, not so much the sex part as wanting to be taken seriously in an industry more than happy to overlook her. The doubts of casting directors became her own doubts.