One of Ava Berkofsky’s most memorable “Insecure” moments ended up being a perfect visual metaphor for the show’s farewell season.

“We were literally shooting a night scene as the sun was coming up, as we were wrapping the season,” Berkofsky, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, remembered in a recent phone interview as HBO airs the show’s fifth and final season. “I just kept having to throw up more and more black solid cloth around the scene to block out the daylight so that we could finish the scene and finish the season and say goodbye to these characters. It was epic. It was really epic, and it really was sort of emblematic of this feeling of you don’t want it to end. But it’s natural that it ends. The sun’s gotta come up.”