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Like the characters she plays, Minnie Driver is a woman who's hard to peg.

She was raised in Barbados, attended boarding school but was encouraged by her family and friends to become an actress.

At 37, she's still a free spirit who loves to surf in the Southern California sun. She has turned down high-profile acting roles just so she can record a small acoustic CD in Nashville.

On her new series, the dark drama "The Riches," she has traded her British accent for a hillbilly twang and her luscious hair for cornrows. She plays Delilah Malloy, a Deep South redneck who is also a drug addict ex-con and the mother in a family of grifters.

After her family accidentally kills a wealthy couple, she and her husband (played by British comedian Eddie Izzard, the show's executive producer) assume the dead couple's identity and live in their fabulous home. Each week, viewers wonder if the Malloys will be unmasked as not being the Riches.

Driver relishes how multidimensionally her character is written.

"She is completely and utterly unpredictable," Driver says. "She is an addict. She is ravaged. She loves her family, but she would kill them if they did anything wrong.

"But I feel like she could also walk away from this family at a drop of a hat. That's the unpredictable quality within her. She is very, very dark and very, very funny. She has no filter.

"She would say things I would never say because I am an articulate, well-brought-up English girl. Yet she feels as natural to me as anything I have played."

Born in England, Driver grew up in a close-knit, free-thinking family.

"My father was a bohemian conservative, and my mother was a full-blown artistic, wonderful hippie," she says. "It was a small family, but it got bigger as my parents had children with other people."

She moved to Hollywood in 1997, after doing dozens of short TV stints in the United Kingdom. The feature film "Grosse Pointe Blank" was her first major role in the United States.

"I felt like Alice in Wonderland," she says of her early days in Los Angeles. "I felt like a pioneer. I had no barometer. No one knew me."

She was nominated for an Outstanding Supporting Actress Academy Award for the 1997 film "Good Will Hunting."

Her "lovely agent" sent her the script for "The Riches" with the reminder that Driver had said often she didn't want to do a series.

She even nixed an idea of doing a "Will & Grace" spin-off, featuring her as the wildly inappropriate British tart Lorraine Finster.

"I laughed more on (`Will & Grace') than I have anything I have worked on," she says, "But I was getting ready to do my record and wanted to focus on that."

However, "The Riches" script lured her to TV in ways nothing else has.

"It was the best thing I had read, film or otherwise," she says.

She met with the producers, and "it was like some weird arranged marriage," full of initial small talk. But when they started talking about her character, they clicked immediately.

"They take my ideas and listen to them," she says. "It's unlike a lot of television I have done. . . . It's a wonderful, free experience, and I feel comfortable here."