A self-confessed “softy,” actress Malin Akerman is learning to be more assertive. It’s a quality you need in Hollywood, she says on a cool, winter day in the guest room of a hotel here.

Akerman, who was born in Sweden but grew up in Canada, is testing her mettle onscreen as well, as the stylish wife of a hedge-fund millionaire on Showtime’s “Billions.” The popular series has returned for its third season and airs Sundays.

“When I was 17 and feeling a bit lost, a friend of my mother’s took me in and brought me to an introduction to some sort of life-coaching course,” she recalls.

“I just went for the day, but there was something that was said in there that changed my point of view for the rest of my life. It was really simple … your life is a clean canvas. You don’t have to bring the past into it with you, and you can create your own ideals and own values and own morals, and you can paint your own painting,” she says looking chic in a black jumpsuit dotted with blobs of fuchsia.

“I just hadn’t thought of it that way. I went, ‘Wow, I can do that. I can do whatever I want with my life, and I’m GOING to do whatever I want with my life.’ There were a few things that were said that day. I said, ‘From now on, I’m going to make my own decisions of what I want my life to look like.’ That took years to figure out, but that was the first stepping stone.”

The second stepping stone was modeling to pay for college where she was studying psychology. But she left after the first year. The “painting” she created for herself involved acting. Her mother, who was a dancer and model, understood. But her father was more circumspect. “First he was hesitant more out of the concern of – ‘I just want you to be able to have a life and to be able to sustain that living, and acting is not known for that – unless you make it, it’s a tough life.’ I understand his reservation, but he never told me not to do it,” she says, leaning forward in a blue paisley side chair.

Her parents had divorced when she was 6. Her dad moved back to Sweden and her mom stayed in Canada. That split profoundly affected her, she says. “That shatters a bit of your view. They were still heroes to me and still infallible and all that kind of stuff, but all of a sudden the family unit vision you have as a kid got shattered. And that was a big moment because there was a lot of things to work through and understand. That was a big change in my point of view of family.”

Leaving Toronto, Akerman, 39, headed for L.A. where she spent two years without an acting nibble. Finally she was cast as the naïve first-time actress in “The Comeback” with Lisa Kudrow. It was a role that paralleled her own life, marking her first professional role.

“I was doing music and was in a band, and I thought, ‘What am I doing? I’ve totally fallen off my path. I’ll give it ONE more shot.’ And that’s when I got ‘The Comeback’ because I was about to go back to Toronto and finish my studies.”

Akerman married musician Roberto Zincone and had a son, Sebastian, now 5. He was 7 months old when she was cast in the sitcom “Trophy Wife.” “Having a child changes everything in a really big way. It changed me in several ways — for me it was the love and the joy and happiness you gain from this little person. If anything, they’re a mirror and they reflect all the things – you see yourself in a completely different way, in a really vulnerable way. So it gave me the opportunity to check myself and go, ‘All right, what are the things that I like about myself and don’t like about myself? Because now I’m going to instill some of these things on this little child.’ So for me, it became a very reflective stage of my life,” she says, her blonde hair framed by the waning afternoon sun.

“You see the world again through a child’s eyes and that is a beautiful thing. You start appreciating things again that you’ve lost touch with.”

After six years of marriage she and her husband divorced. She’s engaged to British actor Jack Donnelly (“Atlantis”), who has moved to the States. “He was planning to (move) anyway but I excelled that,” she grins.

“We met because he was a friend of my sister’s boyfriend and he kept coming out for pilot season for the past two years, just as an acquaintance. Then the last time he was out here, he stayed for a while, and we got to know each other a little better.”

As of press time they hadn’t set a date for the wedding. “We’re working on that,” she says.