Actress Vera Farmiga savors playing mother of psycho

A little after 3 a.m. recently, Vera Farmiga was suddenly awake but wasn’t sure why.

Trees rustling outside her bedroom window? A creaking door? Something moving in her house?

Such noises are hardly new for the Oscar-nominated actress.

“Ever since I made The Conjuring (2013), I think I have some sort of subconscious alarm clock,” the 40-year-old actress said ruefully. “A stupid alarm clock. It goes off around 3:07?a.m., which is when all the bad stuff happened in that very scary movie.”

Most people would roll over and go back to sleep.

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Farmiga goes to work.

“I’m renovating my house,” she said, “so if I’m up at 3 in the morning, a little scared, I figure it’s time to look at light fixtures and door handles. You might as well use the time in a wise way.”

Scary stuff has been her bread and butter lately.

Her most substantial ongoing project is the TV series Bates Motel, on which she plays Norma Bates, the single mother of a confused teenager named Norman (Freddie Highmore).

The audience knows — although the characters don’t — that he will grow up to be the mother-obsessed killer at the heart of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic, Psycho.

The show recently began its second season on A&E.

“I do find dark stories uplifting,” Farmiga acknowledged from the set. “I think it’s during the darkest moments of our lives that we see the light.”

A hit series is something new for Farmiga, whose previous shows — Roar (1997), UC: Undercover (2001-02) and Touching Evil (2004) — failed to click.

Season two of the show will allow audiences to further unravel the complex relationship between the two Bateses.

Farmiga, a 40-year-old mother of two, insists that Norma Bates has much to like about her, even if her attachment to her son seems a bit disturbing.

“Man, I admire her tenacious love for her child,” she said. “She goes to extreme lengths to give her child the life that she imagines for him.”

Yet, like Norman, Norma has issues.

“I like to say that her hardware is working, even if her software is a bit faulty,” Farmiga said. “She’s in the trenches of her own stubbornness and denial.”

This season, the actress said, will be “really wild, wacky and emotional.”

“Everybody becomes more involved with the town, and there are new relationships.”

Farmiga, a native of New Jersey, grew up the second of seven children in a strict Ukrainian family. She didn’t speak English until she was 6.

Initially she planned to be an optometrist, but her plans changed after she took an acting class at Syracuse (N.Y.) University.

The Conjuring, in which she played real-life ghost hunter Lorraine Warren, represents her biggest box-office hit to date. A sequel is reportedly due next year, but Farmiga said she is still waiting for confirmation.

Moviegoers also remember her Oscar-nominated performance as a businesswoman having an on-the-road affair with a corporate downsizer, played by George Clooney, in Up in the Air (2009).