Helen Hunt (‘Blindspotting’) reveals tackling ‘excruciating circumstances’ of incarceration and playing a ‘bright-colored’ matriarch [Exclusive Video Interview]

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” recalls Helen Hunt of her initial reaction to Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs’ plan to adapt their 2018 film “Blindspotting” into a series. The Oscar- and Emmy Award-winning actress was quickly won over, though, by the creators’ desire to focus the Starz show on Jasmine Cephas Jones’ character Ashley and the family of her longtime boyfriend Miles (Casal), who gets arrested in the first moments of the premiere episode. Watch our exclusive video interview above.

Now at the conclusion of its second season — the finale aired on May 26 — “Blindspotting” chronicles the struggles that the couple, their son Sean (Atticus Woodward), and their extended family and friends go through in the aftermath of Miles’ incarceration. Hunt stars as Miles’ mother Rainey, who the actress reveals to be a “bright-colored” and a “big loud liberal.” While in the first season Rainey focused all of her attention on Sean, the performer describes the second season as concerning Rainey’s relationship with Ashley, “Two people who have the same enemy and love the same person and there’s only a scrap, so who gets the scrap?”

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That “scrap” is the privilege of a 48-hour family visitation with Miles, which he only receives once every three months. In the season premiere, Rainey and Ashley butt heads over if and when Rainey will get to partake in this coveted opportunity, as Ashley wants to protect that time for herself and her son. This conflict affects Rainey deeply, and in the third episode she looks to new outlets for her anxiety and grief. “The whole show is about how these excruciating circumstances wear down, tear apart — sometimes bring together — but often tear apart families,” observes the actress.

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In a standout scene in that third episode, the actress delivers a spoken word monologue to God as Rainey attempts to pray for the first time. Hunt says of the “painful” speech in which her character voices her anguish at not being able to help or see her incarcerated son, “I just read it a hundred times and recorded it and listened to it a hundred times and started to fill it in with whatever images would come to me.” She likens the moment to musical theatre or opera when a character must sing because “you cannot express what you have to express by speaking.” “I think what she’s feeling is so razor sharp, and she feels so alone,” she adds.

“Blindspotting” is an especially stylized series, or as Hunt puts it, “a generous bouquet” of different styles and genres including spoken word and choreography. In the sixth episode of the season, for example, the entire ensemble steps back in time to the California gold rush era. While a “departure” for the show in terms of its extremely fun embrace of period and the Western genre, Hunt points out that at its heart, the story beats are the same because Ashley and Miles “want to be together, she wants to rescue him, the boy’s seeing his dad in a cage, the mother’s protective.”

A prolific director, Hunt has worked on acclaimed series helming episodes of “This Is Us,” “Feud: Bette and Joan,” “The Politician,” the revival of “Mad About You” and others. The actress had input on the shot composition of her monologue in the third episode because she “knew that making a relationship with that camera early on would be super important.” The multi-hyphenate would be open to stepping behind the camera for an episode of “Blindspotting” should Casal and Diggs ask, saying, “Send me in where I’m needed, and if they needed a director, I’m there.”

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The season finale of “Blindspotting” includes a beautiful and consequential confrontation between Rainey and Ashley after Rainey learns that Ashley had been unfaithful to Miles. Hunt understood Rainey’s objective in the scene because she understands “how hard it is to pierce someone who’s being consumed by that particular, horribly damaging” feeling of “shame.” The actress related to Ashley, too, who is wondering, “Am I family or not?” Through it all, the award-winning performer notes, these characters “keep swinging viciously, comically, musically… they keep swinging.”

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