AMC's The Killing debuts on Sunday, April 3, and Mireille Enos plays the anchor character of a large, talented cast. Set in a rainy, gray Seattle suffused with secrets and grief, the story is based on Danish show entitled Forbrydelsen (The Crime). of the same name. Though at first glance The Killing might look like a police procedural, the death at the beginning is just the first act that causes ripples across many different lives, inside and outside the police. The show also abides by an unusual structure, illuminating a 24-hour period in each episode.

Enos' Sarah Linden is a detective on the brink of leaving her job to move away with her teenaged son and new fiancée, but she's drawn into the murder investigation and entangled in the consequences. Enos herself is a veteran of both TV (she played twin Mormon sisters on Big Love) and theater (she was nominated for a Tony in a 2005 Broadway production of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), and The Killing represents both the old and the new in her personal repertoire.

You’ve done appearances on a variety of cop shows over the course of your career, like Law & Order, CSI, Without a Trace ... But never as a cop!

Right, never as a cop, until now. On those shows, the visiting female cast are always the grieving and/or duplicitous widows. The Killing is obviously very different structurally. Though this is a remake or re-envisioning, something about the Danish original is sort of impenetrable to the American press; I couldn't really find anyone that has a take on what they expect from this version because no one has seen it -- other than some who saw it on BBC, maybe. How closely does this new version of The Killing match the original? I think their first season had more episodes. Or maybe their first season had less, but each episode was longer, or something. It was not exactly the same. I haven’t seen the original. I’m sorry I’m not being helpful. I’ve heard that it is so wonderful, and that the actress playing Sarah in the Danish original [Sofie Gråbøl] is so beloved. And I thought it was probably safer not to have her wonderful performance in my head.

So how did you perceive the structure of the show when it was presented to you? How did you interpret the concept of doing the 24-hours-per-episode approach? A lot of episodic shows have the task of presenting a new case every week. And were doing just one case for the whole season. We really get to take our time, and it turns into a character piece under the umbrella of a crime drama. The crime is what moves the plot forward, but really the show’s purpose is to get to know everyone who’s touched by the crime. And that’s exciting.

Judging from the pilot, it's going to be more of a revelatory experience than a simple whodunit. The cast of characters is so rich, everyone gets a lot of screen time, and you get to kind of see behind the curtains.

The uncompressed feeling means there's no rush to give everyone their ninety seconds and three catchphrases. And Veena Cabreros Sud is such an amazing writer. She feels so responsible to anyone who’s actually gone through something like this -- to tell it truthfully -- and she’s doing such a beautiful job.

Whenever you talk about a nontraditional cop show, the first reference out of anyone’s mouth is The Wire. Obviously The Killing is not The Wire, but those comparisons in terms of ambition are inevitable. How do you feel about that? I think The Wire was an incredible pieces of television. The pacing, the fact that they allowed the story to unfold ...and the actors' style, too, that real life actually breathes in the story.

Your character, Sarah, seems ... not detached exactly, but very much on guard. While she’s very methodical and hyper-observant in that born-police, born-detective way, she also has the gut instinct that almost pushes her further into the case. How much of a departure was this for you, in terms of your own acting craft? Well, I’ve gotten to play all kinds of different roles, especially if I include my stage time. It’s funny -- I’m a pretty sunny girl in life, but I frequently get cast as women who have a kind of deeper river ... somber, or deeply private, or who feel kind of alien in their worlds. Sarah’s multifaceted ... depending on what kind of room she’s in, she can be more or less engaging. With her son and fiancée you get to see other sides of her, but definitely in terms of her police work she feels like an outsider sometimes because she feels better than everyone else. And sometimes she feels deeply incapable of engaging with other people or finding a connection with other people.

Is that Sarah's basic personality, or is that the accumulated experience of being on that particular job? I think she probably came into the world being private, but then her life experiences just accentuated that.

How has the structure of The Killing affected your experience on the show as an actor? Oh, it makes it so fun to get to do simple, simple storytelling. You’re not being asked to make any leap in time ... you get to just play it out. The only thing that has been tricky is the cast is very fond of each other, and we're having a really good time. We’ve spent weeks and months together now, but these characters have only spent days together, and we’ve had to remind ourselves that on camera we have to slow down that process of knowing one another. And especially with Sarah and Stan [Brent Sexton], we just really enjoy each other.

That’s the polar opposite of the usual TV experience -- you have to pretend that you’ve known each other for years, when in fact you’ve just met ninety minutes ago. And it hasn't been three months of laughter for the characters, but three days of really not liking each other.

Your character has a son and a fiancé. And you yourself, I noticed in passing, started production on this show not two months after you gave birth to your daughter [Vesper Vivianne Ruck, with husband, actor Alan Ruck]. Yes, my little daughter who’s right here with us.

How did being a new mother affect your engagement with a storyline that at its most basic level is about people dealing with the death of someone’s child? When I first auditioned, I was pregnant at the time ... they had asked me to pick some scenes from the pilot that I felt connected to, and there was this gorgeous scene between Sarah and her son Jack [Liam James]. But he’s 13 years old, and I thought, "Nobody’s going to buy me as the mother of a 13-year-old,” even though biologically I could have done it. So I kept avoiding that scene because I thought that was going to be the thing that made me not get the part. And finally they said, “Could you please do the scene with the son?” And Liam is so incredibly talented. So during the pilot I still hadn’t met my daughter yet, I wasn’t officially a mother yet, I still felt like maybe that was a little bit of a stretch. But now I have my daughter, and I think nature takes over, and all those maternal instincts flood in ... and then, like I said, this young actor is so wonderful, so it’s easy to love him. That’s done a lot of the work.

We've done many interviews with people involved in the various AMC shows -- Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad; Elisabeth Moss, Bryan Batt, and Janie Bryant of Mad Men; James Badge Dale of Rubicon; Robert Kirkman of The Walking Dead. Everyone is excited to work on these projects because they’re so novel and different for TV.. What's been your experience in terms of working on an AMC show where they really seem to be going for it with productions like this -- not only risk-taking but also highly focused on the craft, investing a lot of time and effort in writing, casting, and artistic unity? It feels really, really special. We all walk around feeling like we're the luckiest people ever. During the pilot, there were a lot of AMC and Fox people around, watching over this process, and I kept being struck again and again by how hip everyone from AMC is. You hear “television producer,” and then here come these 30-somethings wearing skinny jeans. Wildly intelligent people. You know you hear stories about Hollywood in the 1970s, how everybody was right on the cutting edge, and the inmates were running the asylum a little bit. It was just really a creative time in filmmaking. AMC feels like that. Everybody is young and smart and really excited about telling interesting stories. And they’re succeeding, and the world is responding.

Do you have any particular plans to return to stage acting after The Killing wraps? I would always love to return to theater. I don’t have any specific plans for the hiatus right now, but I definitely hope I get to bounce back and forth.