In life, the deck is usually stacked. But in TV, you can escape that feeling for an hour or so with the CBS legal drama “Bull,” where a sense of fair play is a bedrock of the show’s ethos. The trial consulting firm, led by Michael Weatherly’s psychologist Jason Bull, has a bevy of high-end experts on staff, including the unflappable Marissa Morgan, a veteran of the Department of Homeland Security and a neurolinguistics expert. And she’s played by Geneva Carr, wearing one of the best wardrobes on TV right now.

“Bull” pulls in big numbers for CBS with its mix of humor and its courtroom setting, and for Carr it’s her first long-term TV role. A Tony-nominated stage and TV actress, she said there’s a “work ethic to the theater that absolutely serves television because I never think I have another take. Television is so fast-paced, you can’t ask for one anyway. Once they get what they need, they’re moving on.”

Finding her mark, though, has been a work in progress. “Michael always makes fun of me. They put tape down for the spot where you’re supposed to go — in the theater they tell you where to go and you remember — but I guess I was looking to the ground to find my spot and one of our directors was watching me on camera and he was like, ‘Geneva? I can see you looking for your mark.’ So I was trying to do it really inconspicuously but I kept looking on the ground, and Michael was like, ‘Geneva, you’re gonna have to figure that out!’”

That’s pretty mild as work embarrassments go.

“The one thing about being an actor is, you cannot have any pride because your career ebbs and it flows, it goes up and down, you are constantly embarrassed and you have to roll with it,” she said. “I don’t have any ego, on set or off.”

Example: “I used to dress up as Tweety bird, you want to talk humiliating? And Tweety bird really suffered, I’m just going to say that. You have to be under 5-foot, 4-inches to fit into the costume and it’s hot as bejesus in there. I used to work at the Javits Center (conventional hall in New York) to make money, and I’d go around in character and shake children’s hands at the auto show or whatever. I don’t want to tell you the stories because they’re terrifying. I don’t know why but people have a lot of mixed feelings about Tweety.

“But,” she said, “that’s not even my most embarrassing story!”

MY WORST MOMENT …

“When I was first acting, I was in an off-Broadway play and I had some very experienced actors around me. The one that saved me that day was Rob Sedgwick, who is Kyra Sedgwick’s brother. He’s a great guy and a fantastic actor and we were doing this play called ‘The Weatherbox’ that’s very dramatic. It’s about three siblings who are estranged and their mother is on her deathbed in the hospital. And there’s a scene where I’m arguing with my brother in the kitchen and I have to threaten his life with this knife that I just see on the table!

“In the scene, I’m supposed to come out and give a piece of my mind to my brother and tell him how I felt about him — and I realize, there’s no knife on the table. The prop is missing. And Rob and I look at each other and I’m like a deer in the headlights and I’m trying to remember my lines and emote and live it all and I’m terrified! And the line’s coming up where I have to threaten his life with this nonexistent knife, and right before I had to do something — and he knew I just didn’t know what to do — he turned to me and said, ‘Don’t you try to threaten my life with that book!’

“So I picked up this book — and by the way, he’s this 6-foot, 3-inch muscle-bound man — and, like, 110 pounds of me is trying to threaten his life with a book, it was unbelievable! I’m sure the audience was thinking, ‘How does this woman think she’s going to kill her brother with this book? Is she going to beat him to death with a hardcover?’

But Rob really saved me, and we have laughed about it for years. He was so great, because I wasn’t experienced enough to just live in the moment but he was. So he taught me a lot, about being present and making it work no matter what. Because I had no idea what I was going to do because the scene hinged on that moment.”

THE TAKEAWAY …

“You learn No. 1: Check your props. You have to verify that your props are on a table in the wings because there are stagehands that bring them to the set between scenes. Now I make sure everything’s where it needs to be.

“And you learn No. 2: When you are on stage you are in battle, and the people you work with have your back.

“I mean, I had a scene recently when I was on Broadway in ‘Hand to God’ where I tripped on a cord and I fell on my face and I blacked out. My son has to hit my hand with a hammer in the scene and hurt me very badly and then I turn and there’s a whole blood effect that I do. So I turned to do my blood effect but tripped on a cord, flew and smacked into the stage and for several seconds I was out.

“You’re so loose on stage, it’s almost like being kind of drunk so my body was so relaxed that I didn’t tense up when I fell. But I blacked out. The stage manager had to debate how long to give me to come to! He said it was enough for him to think, ‘She’s dead.’ But then I suddenly got up and started acting again!

“I came to maybe 10 seconds later thinking, ‘Where am I, where am I? Oh!’ In the scene I was supposed to be in pain, so I just started moaning. In real life I was so worried about acting and being there for the audience that I didn’t even think about any pain, I just started doing the scene again.

“I was holding something and it flew out of my hand when I fell, and friends of mine in the audience thought it was all planned, that it was just incredible choreography, because I literally flew spread eagle on the stage, landed, somehow did not injure myself but blacked out and then came to and continued acting.

“When you’re on stage, it’s your fellow actors who have to be able to respond in the moment. I’ve embarrassed myself numerous times on camera, but they just don’t use that take. In the theater, you have to make it work. That adrenaline protects your body. I don’t know how I didn’t injure myself, but I was fine!

“But these are really lessons for life. You gotta just stay present because you never know what’s going to happen. And sometimes on stage you have to use a book to kill someone instead of a knife.”