Toni Collette stars in the new series 'The Power,' and managed to film all her scenes in just 5 weeks after a last-minute recasting. She said she was 'drowning' the entire time.

• Toni Collette stars a Margot Cleary-Lopez in the new Prime Video series "The Power."
• Collette joined the production in its late stages, and filmed all of her scenes in five weeks. 
• Collette told Insider she was "imploding," but the showrunner said her performance was "supernatural." 

"Hereditary" star Toni Collette signed on to Prime Video's 'The Power" as part of a late-game recasting, and the series showrunner told Insider that the actor shot all of her dialogue-heavy scenes for the show in just five weeks. 

Collette plays fictional Seattle mayor Margot Cleary-Lopez in "The Power," a new series based on Naomi Alderman's novel of the same name. In the show, teenage girls spontaneously develop the power to generate electricity from their bodies, passing it along to other women and sparking a paradigm shift in the world's gender dynamics.

For Margot, the power represents a political opportunity — and the chance to pontificate. 

"She has massive monologues, right?" showrunner Raelle Tucker told Insider. "Many scenes, very talky person, and she had five weeks on the schedule to shoot all nine episodes. I've never seen an actor show up more and deliver every single word of that script." 

Collette was cast as Margot after Leslie Mann departed from the role in May 2022, Deadline reported in August 2022. Collette previously told The Times that she felt like some "weird appendage" to the show, given her late entrance and the demands of shooting her portion of the series in a little over the month.  

Collette, on the other hand, told Insider that she was "imploding" during the entire process. 

"I felt like I was hanging on the edge of a cliff," Collette told Insider. "I had so much dialogue and it's such an epic story. The rest of it had been shot, and it was just all on me, all the time. There was nothing else to shoot, so I felt like I was drowning."

Tucker, the showrunner, described Collette's performance during the shoot as "supernatural," telling Insider that every single take that she did was workable. 

"When somebody is a legend like that, they're a legend for a reason," Tucker said. "We were so incredibly fortunate to have her join this cast, and I think she elevated the entire game."