‘The Power’ gives Toni Collette, John Leguizamo another world view

Toni Collette was tossed into “The Power” so quickly she didn’t have time to think about what it was saying.

“I was thrown in the deep and I had five weeks to shoot the entire series,” she says. “I think it’s inevitable as actors, when you’re steeped in a certain world, you want to examine certain ideas that exist within you. I wanted to do the show because it looks at things that are very important to me – inclusivity and equality and a sense of balance that needs to exist in the world.”

Those issues come into play when teenage girls suddenly develop the power to electrocute people at will. Soon, it spreads to older women and there’s a shift in power. A society led by older white men suddenly becomes the purview of women.

In the Prime Video series, Collette plays the mayor of Seattle and the mother of three. One daughter, played by Auli’i Cravalho, begins exhibiting the power, bringing the situation close to home.

For John Leguizamo, who plays Collette’s husband, it’s a chance to show a softer side. “I did another show previously that was really gangstery and violent,” he says. “I was being very aggressive with everybody around me and I didn’t understand what was going on. But, in this, Lopez was a nice, nurturing, sensitive dude, so I was a little extra-sensitive and vulnerable for the two-month period.”

While it’s a science-fiction series, “The Power” taps into issues that Collette says are “going on in our reality. It’s so weird – when I work, some of these stories come into my life and have some correlation with me, and give me some lessons to learn. It’s very strange and mysterious how that happens. There’s so much about the show that’s important politically, socially, just as a species that I don’t want to stop thinking about it.”

For Leguizamo, “The Power” felt more important than other work he has done. “Even though this is entertainment and it’s sci-fi and a genre flick, it’s more than that,” he says. “It’s much weightier. It’s much more important and impactful.”

Set across the globe, “The Power” shows how such a shift could change dynamics in societies everywhere.

When Collette, Leguizamo and other members of the cast were halfway through filming, they saw a teaser of the series and were surprised.

“I was moved to tears just to see all these young women – especially women of color – coming into their own and feeling strong and empowered,” Leguizamo says. “I want it to linger. I want it to be reality, actually.”

Unlike their work with M. Night Shyamalan (Collette was in “The Sixth Sense,” Leguizamo was in “The Happening”), both haven’t been sworn to secrecy about the series’ plot.

With something like “The Sixth Sense,” Collette says, “you have a clear sense of what you can and can’t talk about. And it was really incredible how audiences were holding their tongues and kind of protecting the story. It was actually an incredible communal experience.”

Leguizamo, meanwhile, had a different tact: “It’s difficult for me to shut up anyway. But you don’t want to be a spoiler.”

With “The Power,” he adds, “we don’t want to talk about where this show is going. You do have to keep some things to yourself and keep mum.”

“The Power” begins March 31 on Prime Video.