MELIA KREILING

Mammals (Prime Video)

Kreiling plays Amandine, the wife of James Corden’s Jamie, on Prime Video’s Mammals. At the start of the series, the couple deals with a tragic miscarriage, and during the course of the show, Jamie goes on a quest to figure out if Amandine might be carrying on an affair — or how many men she may be seeing. In the final scene of the show’s first season, however, it’s revealed that Amandine is not the only party guilty of infidelity.

Kreiling recalls: “Essentially, there’s a very big final confrontation where everything we’ve seen for five and a half episodes is completely turned on its head. It’s a brutally honest scene. And I emphasize the word ‘brutal.’ It’s the type of honesty where in my own life, I only know a handful of people — and an even smaller number of women — who give themselves permission to be that honest.”

Aside from the grueling subject matter, the length and format of the conversation presented its own set of challenges. “We’re living in a society where our attention spans are much shorter,” Kreiling explains. “This is a 10-minute scene with two characters, just talking. It’s more set up like two monologues, in a sense. It’s uncommon in TV to have such long scenes.” The heavy lifting was daunting but not unmanageable — Kreiling simply had to approach it differently than she was used to. “You have to abandon all the habits that you’ve acquired over the years working in television where scenes are fast and you’re trying to grasp an audience quickly with one-liners,” she says. “We did it right at the beginning of filming. I remember thinking, ‘I wonder if the crew is going to stay focused for this long. I wonder if I’m going to notice people scratching their nose.’ ”