The actor and director talks about the perils of fame, sexual violence in the industry and returning to the screen in the Mad About You reboot and the new BBC drama World on Fire

Helen Hunt was 34 when she won the best actress Oscar for As Good As It Gets, and the attention made her anxious. “It was a very famous time. I felt quite nervous because I was being followed,” she says. “I remember thinking: ‘What if I can’t turn this off? Am I always going to be walking to my car and there are people with cameras there? Does this last for ever?’”

The answer was no. Hunt is 56 now, and the intervening decades have brought her a more interesting, but intrinsically more private life. After starting her career as a television actor at the age of nine, she has forged a successful life behind the camera, as well as in front of it.

“I don’t think I have that kind of fame now,” she says. “I haven’t been, in my personal life, so intriguing that I’ll always be that famous. I haven’t tried to make that happen. I’d like to be well known so I can get more jobs, but it has quietened down.”

Does she remember the turning point? She traces it back to 2004, when she had her daughter, Makena Lei. “I spent much less time working and doing interviews and more time in private, so it just naturally quietened down and that was nice. I don’t get followed any more, and it doesn’t disturb my life. I get good theatre tickets, and that’s worth all of it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hunt with Jack Nicholson in the 1997 film As Good As It Gets. Photograph: Tristar Pictures/Allstar

Much has been made of the idea that Hunt stepped away from the public eye after the release of four high-profile films in 2000: What Women Want, Cast Away, Pay It Forward and Dr T & the Women. But she sees it very differently. “It’s so funny when people ask: ‘What happened to you?’ Well, I had a baby – I made a whole person – and I co-wrote, directed and produced two entire films so it didn’t seem so quiet to me. There’s a difference between working hard and being famous.”

The films she is referring to are Then She Found Me (2007) and Ride (2014). The former centres on the complicated relationship between a 39-year-old woman (Hunt), who is estranged from her husband and longs for a child, and her biological mother (Bette Midler), who reappears in her life after the death of her adoptive mother. The film is loosely based on a novel by Elinor Lipman, but Hunt included a fertility struggle because, at the time, she was trying to get pregnant and it was all she could think about. “Having a biological clock pounding in my ears, I thought: ‘Well, if I’m going to play this part, she’s got to either have a baby or want to have a baby.”

Hunt spent 10 years getting the film off the ground, only for the distributor, Think Film, to go bankrupt before the film’s release, meaning there was no promotion and no advertising.

“That was the most crushing …” she breaks off. “It doesn’t take away from the experience of making it, but then you want people to see what you did. So that was hard; that was very hard.” In interviews from that time, she comes across as defensive and prickly. In hindsight, she was probably heartbroken. “I would like to blink and have everybody in the world have seen it,” she says now.

When we meet in Los Angeles, she has come straight from the writers’ room for the forthcoming reboot of Mad About You. The US comedy, about a newly married New York couple, ran from 1992 to 1999. Hunt won three Golden Globes for her razor-sharp portrayal of PR Jamie Buchman. She and her co-star, Paul Reiser (who played Jamie’s husband), will executive produce and star in 12 new episodes. Hunt will also direct the first episode, having recently served as a director on episodes of the major US hits This Is Us and Feud, as well as The Politician, Ryan Murphy’s latest big project for Netflix.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hunt with (left) Paul Reiser as her husband and Kevin Bacon as himself in Mad About You. Photograph: NBC/NBC via Getty Images

“I’m concerned that we’ll wreck it,” she says of Mad About You. “But you never know. I don’t know if I’m going to be good in something, that’s what makes it exciting; the risk that it might not go well. I’m pretty practised at putting the worry aside.”

She and her daughter, who is now 15, are both politically engaged. They have attended marches together, including the Women’s March held the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration. Hunt has been active in fighting for equality on the Mad About You reboot. Most of the 11 directors are women, including women of colour. “I’ve tried very hard to fight for pay parity,” she says. “It’s much harder than you think. People who pay the money say: ‘Well, I want pay parity, but this man has more experience.’ To which we’re replying: ‘Yes, but what was the context? Was this woman given the same opportunities as this man?’ It’s entirely possible he had more options than she did, so we fight for pay parity in order to take that context into account.”

It is not something she thought about when starring opposite, say, Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets or Tom Hanks in Cast Away. “At that point in my career, I didn’t know to fight for it. It never occurred to me I should be paid the same amount. Quite frankly, they could have argued people were buying tickets because of Jack or Tom, and that would have been correct.”

Has she noticed any other changes in the industry since the advent of the Time’s Up movement? “I think it has made movie sets somewhat safer; there’s some amount of recourse if you feel in danger or objectified,” she says. “It does feel like now you could get in trouble, and thank God.”

Over the years, she has worked with Mel Gibson, Kevin Spacey and Woody Allen. Should we be boycotting their work? “Here’s the only thing I can really contribute,” she says, choosing her words carefully. “I think a big part of the problem is that if a woman is assaulted, by the time they feel they can get the words out of their mouth, there are statute of limitation laws that say ‘too late’. So, while I understand the backlash of, ‘you just point a finger at me and my career’s over’, until those laws are revised, it’s going to be a giant, painful mess and it shouldn’t be only up to the women who have been victimised to metabolise that. That issue is bigger than anybody sees. My understanding is that it has much more to do with a backlog in court. That’s a real problem.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hunt with (from left) Salman Rushdie, Colin Firth and Matthew Broderick in Then She Found Me. Photograph: Allstar/ThinkFilm/Sportsphoto

She has been exploring issues around sexual violence in her latest role, in the new BBC One drama World on Fire. Hunt plays Nancy Campbell, a war correspondent who is a victim of sexual violence, loosely based on the trailblazing British journalist Clare Hollingworth, who broke the news of the outbreak of the second world war.

Hunt did meticulous research, for better or worse. “On that set, I began to know things that some people don’t, unless you do a deep dive in that particular area. Of course, there’s sexual violence everywhere – it’s one of the great atrocities of our age – but I didn’t understand it was as institutionalised and organised. That fuelled a lot of what I did. And with all the sexual violence being illuminated at home in the last few years, I certainly didn’t have to reach very far to have a lot of feelings about that.

“I remember feeling that Campbell was contemporary. She’s ahead of everybody in the story and knows what’s coming before other people do. It all seemed very immediate to me, and relevant.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Helen Hunt (as Nancy Campbell) in World on Fire. Photograph: Dusan Martincek/Mammoth Screen 2019

The call to be in World on Fire came out of the blue. “Would you like to go to Prague and act in something?” She doesn’t leave her daughter very often, she says, “but everything lined up. I remember thinking: ‘The material’s good, the part is good, the city is good.’ I mean, I don’t have a complaint.”

Parts like that get given to her only once in a blue moon, she says. “Most of your life as an actor is trying to persuade people you can do a part.” Surely, there’s less persuasion involved once you have an Oscar? “Often with women, there’s a big dry spell afterwards,” she says. “I heard an actress say that, for about a year you’ve got some wind at your back, but after that, you just go back to finding a good job. I don’t think it’s a big game-changer. It can be, but it’s not like your worries are over in terms of getting good parts. I’ve had ups and downs. It was a dream come true, which is a great thing to be able to say; then you go back to work, trying to forge a career that’s fulfilling.”

Hunt was born and brought up in Culver City, California, the home of many major movie studios over the years, and was inspired to get into the industry by her father, a director and acting coach. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hunt’s daughter is keen to follow her mother into the family business. “I can hardly say I don’t understand,” she says. “There’s no point in me saying anything other than: ‘I hope it’s wonderful,’ because she already loves it. I can’t cure the endless, ‘Will I work again?’ thing that every actor has, including Meryl Streep. I’m always sure it’s the last job.”

World on Fire starts on BBC One later this year