Hollywood actress says she followed the scripts to television

ACTRESS Naomi Watts is the latest female A-lister to turn her back on the big screen.

The Oscar nominee stars in new Netflix psychological thriller Gypsy.

And she is in good company in leaving the big screen behind.

Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Watts’s close friend Nicole Kidman, who headlined the recent Sky Atlantic hit Big Little Lies, have all made the jump.

So too have Susan Sarandon and Jessica Lange, who play Bette Davis and Joan Crawford in Feud: Bette And Joan, which will air on BBC Two later this year.

Watts found her break-out role in David Lynch’s critically acclaimed drama Mulholland Drive, earned a best actress nod from the Academy for 21 Grams and hit box office success as Ann Darrow in 2005’s King Kong.

But she discovered Hollywood’s recent appetite for superheroes and reboots were not providing her with the complex and thoughtful roles she was interested in.

Instead she found what she was looking for in Gypsy, in which she plays Jean Holloway, a successful but duplicitous psychotherapist who is a married professional by day but a completely different person by night, carrying on an affair with a younger woman and meddling in the lives of her patients.

Watts, 48, says she was not actively looking to move into television but had to go where the best parts were.

“I definitely noticed that a lot of great writing was taking place in the TV format now, probably because of the sad state of the film industry and how all the films getting made are mostly in the franchise world, or superheroes or big