The Bridge, Inglourious Basterds and National Treasure actress Diane Kruger says the mother she plays on the new drama, Little Disasters, needs help, but doesn't known how to ask for it following the birth of her third child.

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"She is completely overwhelmed and shut into her own nightmare, right? She is incapable of addressing it, of naming what is wrong," Kruger, 49, told UPI in a recent Zoom interview.

"There's a lot of, to me anyways, relatable struggles within her that I can relate to. Obviously, I never lived them out to that extreme, but I think it's so scary when you become a parent and we don't talk about it enough," said the actress, who shares a 7-year-old daughter with partner Norman Reedus.

"I've had a couple of girlfriends in my circle who were dealing with issues like that and I remember not understanding what was going on and, looking in from the outside, it almost felt like my friends were being taken away from me. I couldn't understand what was wrong and, so, to get the opportunity to sort of try to understand and lean into that, it felt very cathartic."

Premiering Thursday on Paramount+, the six-episode British series is based on Sarah Vaughan's bestselling book.

It looks at how the friendships of Jess (Kruger), Liz (Jo Joyner), Charlotte (Shelley Conn) and Mel (Emily Taaffe) are tested when Jess brings her baby daughter to the hospital with a skull fracture she cannot explain and emergency room doctor Liz reports the injury to the authorities.

"When I got the first three scripts, they were real page-turners, I couldn't put them down," Kruger said.

"I love a show that's a 'whodunnit,' and I really don't know, and it's well-written, so I don't know," she added. "And then, of course, [I wanted] the opportunity to dive into such an important female mental health crisis when it comes to postpartum and the journey of motherhood."

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The show depicts the moms and their spouses bonding through a birth-preparation class, remaining close for years, then drifting apart as their parenting styles differed and kids' interests changed.

The women are seen as incredibly supportive of each other, but also competitive and judgmental at times.

"I think it's very realistic. I found that most things in the show, when it comes to those subjects, are very well written -- the relationships, what it means to have a child, what it means for your partner and you, that feeling of being overwhelmed with different types of parenting," Kruger said.

"I thought that was really interesting. I love that all the four women came from different social backgrounds and different walks of life," she added. "There was just a universal truthfulness, an honesty, I thought, and that's refreshing to see. It wasn't glanced over or made pretty."

The actress doesn't think mothers' attempts to protect their children from life's unpleasantness -- sometimes even striving for the unattainable goal of perfection -- are uniquely 21st century challenges.

"I think that's always been like it," she said.

"I don't know for sure. But when I see my mom and what she went through as a single mom and trying to make ends meet and trying to not put that on us and what she must have gone through -- she's never said anything to me -- but now that I'm older and, not that I have the same struggles, but, I recognize it. So, I can only imagine what that was like for my grandmother's generation."

Because the role was such an intense one, Kruger was eager to let it go at the end of the day.

"It was great to come home at night," she recalled.

"It was summer, so my daughter was with me, and coming home felt like coming back to heaven, just to have a happy, smiling face. It felt really good, but it was a very exhausting shoot.

"I'm not ready to go back to do that quite soon," she laughed.