A group of diamond thieves get more than they bargained for in Leopard Skin. The psychological thriller series sees the group fleeing a botched robbery and taking refuge in an isolated beach house occupied by two women, whose complicated relationship could bring their own plans of escape to a standstill.

Carla Gugino leads the cast of Leopard Skin alongside Gaite Jansen, Nora Arnezeder, Gentry White, Margot Bingham, Amelia Eve, Philip Winchester, Ana de la Reguera, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Reuniting Gugino with Jett creator, and real-life partner Sebastián Gutiérrez, the series proves to be a unique blend of cat-and-mouse thriller with surreal character drama.

Related: Carla Gugino’s 10 Best Film & TV Roles, According To IMDb

In anticipation of the show's premiere, Screen Rant spoke exclusively with executive producer and star Carla Gugino to discuss Leopard Skin, working with Gutiérrez to craft the Peacock thriller, helping cast a number of prior collaborators, her excitement for The Fall of the House of Usher, and more.

Carla Gugino on Leopard Skin

Carla Gugino in Leopard Skin

Screen Rant: I love how Leopard Skin is very much this cat-and-mouse thriller, as much as it is this off-kilter character drama.

Carla Gugino: By the way, that's a really beautiful assessment of it, because it is. I think, for the best reasons, it's very hard to encapsulate. It is like a cinematic novel; it keeps unfolding.

I love the way it jumps around, and it fleshes out every single character throughout its run. This comes from your partner, but as an actor, you also want to be involved with the best possible projects. When did you start having those conversations with him about this idea, and how involved were you in helping develop it to be something that you wanted to be a part of?

Carla Gugino: Sebastián Gutiérrez is amazing that way, because he's one of the few people that has an idea, and it becomes a reality extremely quickly. It's annoying. [Laughs] No, it's an incredible quality. During the pandemic, all of us had gotten back to work, but for all the obvious reasons, it needed to be with all the safety precautions. Everyone was wearing masks all the time, covered in things, you're rehearsing where you can't see the other person's face.

We made it through testing every day, all of the things, and Sebastián thought, "Well, what if I could write something that we could do with a relatively small cast and crew, and be able to go to a place that we could live and film in and once we were there, and everyone tested negative and everyone was safe?" No one left the property, so we were able to actually have truly sort of a mirror image of the show in that kind of dreamlike, magic realism. Like, "Look where we are, this is crazy." But what was interesting is that, I think when you work with people that you know well, it actually has to be even better to do that.

You are your own harshest judges, so I think that, [while] it would have been fun to be somewhere beautiful, shooting something less complex, the experience was incredibly profound. Because the material was so complex that it really did require all of us to really take a lot of risks with each other. What's nice about building a troupe to do that with is that you have a lot of trust. So you know, Gaite Jansen, who plays Batty, is a brilliant actress, we'd worked together on Jett, so there was a lot of trust there, and Gentry White, obviously, we had also done Jett with.

Amelia Eve, I had done The Haunting of Bly Manor with, so it's been such a [treat]. Jeffrey Dean Morgan and I did Watchmen together, so all of that promotes a place in which you have a bunch of storytellers, and then of course wonderful new people that we hadn't worked with before. Phillip Winchester, I think, is just so fantastic in the show, he just cracks me up.

Jeffrey Dean Morgan in Leopard Skin

Since you are also an executive producer, how involved you were in that casting process alongside Sebastián?

Carla Gugino: Yeah, I was very involved in the casting process, for sure. I was intimately involved in a lot of the making of it, other than the fact that Sebastián, this world comes out of his brain, I take no credit for that whatsoever. What I do love is that he continues to surprise me with how intuitive, and complex, and funny, and full he writes his female characters. I think part of it is because he was raised in South America, his father died when he was young, so he was raised by a bunch of women, and I think that really has informed a lot. So, in that way, that aspect is him, and then in terms of the making of it, we were very much a team in doing that.

I really do love that they formed this unintentional sisterhood. Even though you've worked with a few of them before, what was it like developing that rapport and that chemistry with one during filming?

Carla Gugino: It was really cool, because in terms of those four women that you're speaking to, obviously, Gaite and Amelia and I had worked together. But I hadn't ever worked with Ana, and Ana is one of those people that is just a true light. You absolutely cannot help but fall in love with Ana the moment you meet her. She taught Gaite and I, we did salsa lessons with her and stuff, we had such a blast. But all of us were eating together every night, we lived where we worked, there was nowhere else to go, we were just all together walking on the beach, or having a meal, or watching a movie.

What was wonderful is upon meeting Ana immediately, I was able to kind of just deeply connect with her, and I think there is something about both the fact that these characters have no intention of being victimized, and fight for their beliefs, and the fact that you have this sort of magic realism element to the show, this dreamlike quality, this sort of backwards and forwards in time, very much like the water, very much like our environment there. I think that so often, always, location affects you, and it plays a character in the piece, and we speak about that a lot. But I don't think that I've ever been on something where it influenced it as much as this.

Ana De La Reguera in Leopard Skin

Just the fact that where we were filming every day, the power would go out once a day, and we would have to stop filming and sit for a moment and just take in nature. Then the power would come back on. Or the fact that we could walk to set barefoot, or go take a swim at lunch. All of these things were also really helpful for me to realize Alba Fontana chose to live in a place that was that remote, and where there was, at this point in her life — she'd always been a documentarian, so she was the voyeur. At this point, she removes herself from an outward gaze, and that's where this very unconventional power play, sexy sort of dynamic that ends up emerging in the show that she didn't expect.

She doesn't even know what it means, but she does know that there's some part of her life that is opening to her that she wants to explore, and I think it's always interesting to go, "What would you do if someone told you they would do anything for you, and no one else was looking?" This certainly explores those elements.

Narrator The Haunting of Bly Manor

Since you mentioned The Haunting of Bly Manor, I'm a huge Mike Flanagan fanatic. I love that you've been working with him since Gerald's Game and are now reuniting for The Fall of the House of Usher. I know you can't tell me much about it, but what it is like working on that show in comparison to your previous collaborations with him?

Carla Gugino: Well, I just adore working with him, and I would say that what's interesting about this piece is that there's a lot of black humor. Tonally, he is it, and it is him, quite similar to the way that Sebastián Gutiérrez is like that, they are true auteurs in that way. So, you feel him in the fiber of the show, and it's come out of his brain. But it is definitely tonally different than what you have seen before, and that's what I love. I think with Midnight Club, he's done that in a different way what I love is that he just always wants to over new terrain, and yet he remains such a truth teller through that particular genre.

I will say that both of these roles, in different ways, are two of the most extraordinary roles I've ever gotten to play. So for me, this one was something that I had to go I couldn't hold back, I had to go full bore at the risk of possibly embarrassing myself, but it was a role in which — and I can't speak too much about it right now — but overall in which there are multiple forms taken, and if I kind of sat back on it, it wouldn't have worked. So, it was tremendously scary for me, and also extremely exciting. I couldn't have done that if I wasn't in the hands of somebody that I trusted on a creative level, but I think people will really dig this show, it's going to be pretty amazing, and the cast is extraordinary.

Carla Gugino, Gaite Jansen and Ana De La Reguera in Leopard Skin

Coming back to Leopard Skin, we've talked a lot about the various layers to both the show and your character. What would you say were some of the biggest creative challenges you faced while getting to the heart of your character?

Carla Gugino: I think the sort of insular nature of it was both a challenge and a gift. One of the things that, it's sort of Acting 101, on some level, is don't judge your characters. If you're judging your characters, you're probably not — since everyone is the hero of their own story, and we are protagonists no matter what, that you're off.

I think that there were a couple of moments in Alba's journey that really scared me, and that I have ideas about, or judgments about, or this or that, and I think that what would the biggest challenge for me was just to really make less apparent decisions about a trajectory of the character than I might normally make, and be comfortable, or be willing, to be uncomfortable in the place of a character that really is bold enough to search for who she is now, and release the context of who she was.

So, when you're doing a show in a place that's that remote, with such an intimate group of people exploring identity, it's risky, and it's scary. So, I guess in that way, I guess I'm coming back to a theme, which is that the roles that I'm interested in now, I think, are ones that excite me and scare me in equal parts, and this one certainly did.

About Leopard Skin

leopard skin four women hiding in tub

Fleeing a botched diamond heist masterminded by crooked Judge Lasalle (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a criminal gang (Nora Arnezeder, Gentry White, Margot Bingham) seeks shelter in the remote paradise of Playa Perdida, Mexico in the beachside estate where two intriguing women, Alba and Batty (Carla Gugino, Gaite Jansen) live. Dark and humorous complications arise when they are joined by two dinner guests, documentary producer Max (Philip Winchester), his flighty girlfriend Maru (Amelia Eve) and the estate’s former housekeeper, Inocencia (Ana de la Reguera). When they are all taken hostage, murderous secrets, coldhearted betrayals and shocking desires bubble to the surface as everyone awaits their fate.

Next: Why Carla Gugino & Kate Siegel Were Bly Manor's Best-Kept Secrets

Leopard Skin begins streaming on Peacock on November 17.