Until a few years ago, actor Tamara Tunie was unfamiliar with the DMV’s particularly refined level of bougie. Then her friend Drew Hawkins, the board chair of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture, invited her to spend some time on his boat for the Fourth of July.

She was impressed.

“I think they call it a raft-off?” Tunie explained last week, fresh off emceeing the Baltimore museum’s 20th anniversary gala. “One boat anchors, and all the other boats anchor to that boat, and you have a party on the water. Here are all these African Americans of affluence in their little mini-yachts, and I was like ‘What is happening? Oh, yes!’”

The veteran performer, known for everything from “As The World Turns” to “Law and Order: Special Victims Unit” to the Whitney Houston biopic “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” did not know that she’d one day be playing one of those residents of affluence — and that she’d love it.

“Doing this show, I learned more about these fabulous gated communities in which a lot of African Americans live,” Tunie said of “Beyond The Gates,” CBS’ recently renewed hit daytime drama about Maryland’s fictional Fairmont Crest. Though that particular enclave might not exist, the kind of people that live there do.

“It’s real!” confirmed Tunie, who plays matriarch Anita Dupree, ruling over not only Fairmont Crest and its residents but her very glamorous and drama-filled family. The show has all the champagne-throwing, back-stabbing, tearful breakdowns and elaborate fashion worn around the house for no particular reason that we’ve come to expect from soaps. (There’s also an absolutely over-the-top villain gunning for the Dupree family whose name happens to be Leslie, leading me to introduce myself by saying, ‘I’m Leslie … but not that Leslie." It got a laugh.)

“It’s good soap opera stuff‚" Tunie agreed. It’s a change from her time on “As The World Turns”: She’s top-billed in the first daytime drama to not only center a Black family but have a mostly Black staff behind the scenes, from creator and writer Michele Val Jean to the hair and makeup artists.

“I’ve been doing this for 40 years, and I would say that 90% of that time, I was usually the only Black person in the room or on a project,” Tunie said. “It’s made a real difference.”

Tunie believes her long presence in entertainment has brought a new audience to “Beyond the Gates.” As a longtime fan, I was excited to see her on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” holding court like the big star she is. “I’ve been doing this for 40 years now, and ‘Beyond the Gates’ was what got me on Colbert! Nothing else has,” she said. “I was just so thrilled with my late-night television debut. It made it important to be on a late-night television show to talk about a soap opera, because someone might see it and say, ‘I might catch that!’”

One of her biggest fanbases is from her time on “SVU,” where she played medical examiner Melinda Warner, a role she recently reprised in a cameo on spinoff “Law and Order: Organized Crime.” Warner was written, as Tunie put it, “as ‘just the facts, ma’am” — a clear-headed presence amid the sometimes gory storylines.

“What was really wonderful is that I have learned that I have inspired so many Black women to go into forensic science,” Tunie said. “So many Black women have approached me and said, ‘My daughter is studying forensic science’ or ‘I am.’ That’s the power of television, of what it can do when it shows people possibilities.”

Back on “As The World Turns,” Tunie got to meet a very, young talented woman making her television debut, whose brief time on the show certainly showed she had the possibility of being the icon she became.

“I loved her on every level,” she said of future Grammy winner Lauryn Hill, who played a troubled teen named Kira. “She was 14 years old, and her talent was apparent. She would write poetry and share it with me. I would hear her singing in her dressing room.”

Tunie, whose character was about to get married, went to the producers and said, “‘This child should sing at the wedding.’ And she did. And that was Lauryn Hill’s debut to the world with her singing.”

Icons recognize icons, of course. Tunie is proud of being part of projects that show, however over-the-top, the full gamut of the Black experience, depicting everyone from secretary to senator.

That’s why it was so important for her to come to town to celebrate the Lewis Museum, whose mission is uniquely important in this fraught moment. “It focuses on our history — which is American history — to shine a light on it. If my presence there can get people to become more aware of it, to support it financially, that’s good. We need that more than ever," she said. “When we see how things have shifted, it becomes the community’s responsibility to educate everyone, not just African Americans.”