Amy Huberman in "Striking Out"

On the subject of empowered women, we offer for your consideration Tara Rafferty.

As played by Amy Huberman on the hit Irish drama “Striking Out,” which recently began streaming its second season on Acorn TV, she’s the successful Dublin-based lawyer who in Season 1 found her life upended when she discovers her fiance, fellow solicitor Eric Dunbar (Rory Keenan), has been cheating on her. She breaks up with him, quits the law firm where they both worked and sets off on her own to build a new life and legal practice, finding in the process that she might just be better off on her own.

As Season 2 opens, a confident Tara has settled in as her own boss, but finds herself and her staff – assistant Ray Lamont (Emmet Byrne), tech guru/detective Meg Riley (Fiona O’Shaughnessy) and senior counsel Vincent Pike (Neil Morrissey) – faced with morally challenging scenarios that will test them both personally and professionally.

“She kind of becomes quite personally invested with certain clients that she’s representing,” Huberman told a recent gathering of journalists in Pasadena, Calif., “and she keeps getting advice like, ‘Step back. Step back.’ So you kind of have this professional armor, but then you’ve got you … as the human and how they relate to it, and often you kind of have to keep private and keep hidden because you can’t display that in a courtroom or to your client.”

“It’s the professional front, and then it’s how the person is dealing with it,” the Irish actress continues. “And also, then, the echoes it has in their own personal life, because so many human stories are universal, and we recognize so much of what other people are going through with what we are going through, and I think you do get to see the different layers of that for the characters, so it becomes a really useful story aid, as well to tell us more about the people that we’re watching.”

Playing someone who has had the figurative rug pulled from under her offered Huberman the opportunity to flex a few acting muscles, portraying Tara at different times as a serious, tragic and even comedic figure. It was a prospect she embraced from the first script.

“To be afforded so much range as an actor was brilliant,” she says. “And I’d actually done quite a bit of comedy before I had done ‘Striking Out,’ so I was really hungry to flex a really dramatic role in the parameters of what ‘Striking Out’ was; that I had all of that journey to go through, and Episode 1 of Series 1 is quite – it opens, and you’re in the drama, and she has a big journey to go through.”