It is important too, Bening adds, that women are not written simply as strong in reaction to outdated stereotypes, but also written with complexity. “Not just strong characters, that’s a cliche, isn’t it? But a strong, nuanced character who has flaws, who screws up, who does the wrong thing, who is crazy.

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“That’s how people are,” Bening says.“People have all these different colours. Strong characters are great, but a strong character that has vulnerability is much more interesting.”

In Apples Never Fall, Bening plays Joy Delaney, a retired tennis champion. With her husband Stan (Sam Neill), the Delaneys enjoyed a long career at the top of the mixed doubles and parlayed that into retirement in Palm Beach.

Tennis dominates the family’s life, though none of the Delaney children – Troy (Jake Lacy), Amy (Alison Brie), Logan (Conor Merrigan-Turner) and Brooke (Essie Randles) – ever matched their parents’ success on the court. Apples never fall, as the title suggests.

Life is a jumble of normalcy, parental disappointment and interpersonal frustration, until Joy goes missing, and the family begins to crumble, with cracks appearing in the seemingly happy facade and long-held secrets beginning to spill into the open.

“Joy has a lot of contradictions,” Bening says. “She’s in a pressure cooker of her own making. In a way, I guess we all are. We make our choices. In her case, in her life with her family, there are certain things she ended up doing that didn’t serve her in the long run.”

Moriarty, the pen behind Big Little Lies and Nine Perfect Strangers, knows how to mine these micro-worlds and their complex hierarchies and power structures well. In this case, the series exchanges the book’s Sydney setting for Palm Beach, Florida.

Bening is currently surfing the wave of Oscar season, nominated for her performance in Nyad, Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi and Jimmy Chin’s film about 60-year-old long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad who, in 2010, resolved to accomplish a 177-kilometre nonstop swim from Cuba to Florida.

Nyad is Bening’s fifth Oscar nomination. She was previously nominated for her performances in The Grifters (1990), American Beauty (1999), Being Julia (2004) and The Kids Are All Right (2010). Bening has a BAFTA and two Golden Globes but thus far an Oscar has eluded her.

“Diana is such an extraordinary woman,” Bening, 65, says. “From when I was very young and I started out in the theatre, I imagined that I would continue to play my age as I went through my life, I don’t know why, but I always thought about that.

“Maybe it’s because I also admired some of the actresses who were older than I was, and I was watching them age, and I was watching them continue to play and to work,” Bening says. “I feel liberated right now, too, because what I’ve been able to do has so far surpassed, in terms of opportunities, what I ever would have imagined.”

With a more-than-four-decade career behind her, with memorable performances like Myra Langtry in The Grifters, Sydney Wade in The American President, Irina Arkadina in The Seagull and even Supreme Intelligence in Captain Marvel, Bening says she feels empowered as an actress because she is free to make choices about what she wants to do.

“When I work, it’s because I just want to be there,” she says. “I love it. I feel lucky. And [Apples Never Fall] was, for me, a joy. We got along so well … Sometimes there’s one person that’s unhappy for whatever reason [but] we didn’t have that,” Bening adds. “We had this ensemble, and we just love being together. It was extraordinary. Life’s too short for me to do stuff that I don’t want to, and I don’t have to.”

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Bening is quick to credit Moriarty for being part of a shift in the industry in terms of how women are portrayed on television. “There are more and more opportunities where the stereotypes of women, not only older women, but younger women, are being transformed even since I started in the business,” Bening says. “And it comes from a project like this [thanks to] Liane’s imagination. She writes such juicy stories and juicy parts.

“Then when Melanie Marnich came in and really took it over, that’s what really got me super excited because I could tell she was obsessed and that she had this strong commitment to it and vision of it,” Bening adds. “Once I saw that and everything, I thought, wow, this is just such an opportunity.”

“I had never done something over so many episodes, so as we were working Melanie established this atmosphere where we were all in it together … You could have an idea in the middle of the night, and sometimes that’s not the good idea, but it’s the idea that comes from that idea.”

Apples Never Fall streams on Binge from Thursday, March 14.

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