Jane Lynch brings her experience with The Second City and numerous comedy movies to Fox's 'Glee'. (AP)

Often within the life of TV villains, some revelation from their past or unexpected emotional connection melts the cold exterior and makes their unfeeling hearts grow three sizes in Grinch-like fashion. And there’s a possibility that the same might happen to Sue Sylvester, the deliciously evil cheer leading coach on Fox’s Glee, says her portrayer, Jane Lynch.

Just don’t blink, or you might miss it.

“Her heart will be touched by somebody, and you’ll see a little bit of her family life. She’ll be touched a little bit, and then returns to her wicked ways,” says Lynch, known for her twistedly arch characters in Christopher Guest’s Best In Show and A Mighty Wind, The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Role Models, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, The L Word, Three and a Half Men and Starz’ Party Down, among others.

“She won’t be giving out a lot of hugs this season,” Lynch continues. “She expresses her affection in her own way.”

So far Sue, the eternally track-suited leader of the insipid Cheerios squad of fictional William McKinley High of Lima, Ohio, has shown affection only for the power she wields at school, and for the opportunity to rule lives and crush dreams.

“Sue’s pure evil and doesn’t hide it. It’s fun,” Lynch says, laughing. “What I love most is that she has fun doing it. There’s a sparkle in her eye. She finds being evil delicious and shocks people with how far she goes.”

Currently, the dreams she would most love to crush are those of the show’s titular glee club and their sweet but determined adviser Will Schuster (played by Tony nominee Matthew Morrison).

“She smells their hot breath on the back of her neck. They are threatening her power,” Lynch says of Sue, who so far this season has enlisted cheerleaders to infiltrate the glee club and destroy it from the inside, and pretty blatantly threatened to make Mr. Schuster’s life miserable if he doesn’t disband the club.

She commits all of this delicious evil in that ever-changing track suit, holding a megaphone and sipping a smoothie. Megaphones and smoothies are usually innocent, but with them as her “totems,” as Lynch calls them, they appear to be instruments of evil.

That a cheerleading coach would plot to make the lives of innocent students miserable to suit her own agenda is all part of the, well, gleefully subversive fabric of Glee, created by Ryan Murphy, of FX’s disturbingly dark Nip/Tuck.

In an unusual move, Fox showed Glee’s premiere in May, right after the season finale of American Idol. Ratings were modest, but built-up buzz over the summer, constant ads and replay of the episode’s joyous version of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing had anticipation “whipped up into a fever pitch,” Lynch says.

Lynch’s success seems to come from her work ethic. An Illinois native and holder of a master’s in fine arts from Cornell University, she toured with Chicago’s famous The Second City comedy troupe. That training “taught me to show up with my own ideas,” she says.

Since 2003, Lynch has appeared in more than 40 films and more than 30 television shows. But since taping the first 13 episodes of Glee, and while waiting to get back to work in January, the 49-year-old actress has had some rare down time, although she is doing a Nora Ephron play called Love, Loss and What I Wore off-Broadway.

Her young co-stars, she says, share her commitment to work, as they’re “having their summer stock experience in front of the entire world.”

Lynch has found a way to channel the deliciously evil snobbery and cutthroat determination of Sue Sylvester in ways that shock even her.

“She turns the kids in the glee club against each other, dividing them by race and physical disability, and makes them hate each other,” she says. “Sweet, huh?”