What happens when we lose hold of our own secrets? Gugu Mbatha-Raw is excited for us to find out.
Apple TV+'s new series, Surface, is an opulent psychological thriller that tells the story of intimate self discovery centered on one question: What happens when we lose hold of our own secrets?
The show stars Gugu Mbatha-Raw as Sophie, a woman recovering from a traumatic head injury that has left her with severe memory loss, the cause of which she's told was a suicide attempt.
As she tries to connect the dots of her injury, though, Sophie begins to question whether or not she's been given all the pieces to her own story. The result is an elevated mystery that challenges its viewers to consider how far we can expect our own fate to take us.
In ET's exclusive sneak peek, Mbatha-Raw captivates alongside Oliver Jackson-Cohen, who plays Sophie's husband, as she first attempts to fill in the missing details of her mysterious accident.
"How long was I in the ICU?" she asks her husband, tentatively. "Where were you when I woke up in the hospital?"
He tells her she was there for three weeks, and that he was on his way home to take a shower when she first stirred. "I ran a red light trying to get back to you," he says. Though they exchange a laugh, the couple remains on edge, staring at each other from across their kitchen island -- the tension mounting.
When her husband expresses confusion as to why Sophie also wants to know about a conference he had attended in Portland, she tells him, "Just putting the pieces together." The line becomes the namesake of the show's first episode, "Putting the Pieces Together," out this Friday, July 29.
ET spoke with Mbatha-Raw at the show's New York premiere last week, where she raved about her character's tedious search for answers.
"It's so juicy," she said. "I mean, this show is such a thrilling mystery and it's a real psychological thriller with so many twists and turns every episode."
At the start, she explained, "the audience knows as much as she does... so you're sort of immediately drawn into her world."
"It's set in San Francisco, in this very luxurious world, but something's off under the surface," the former Morning Show star hinted. "These people seemingly have everything, but there's an unsettling energy.... My character not knowing her past, she essentially is the mystery."
Mbatha-Raw said fans of psychological thrillers and female-driven mysteries will love the series -- no surprise, given that Big Little Lies producer and star Reese Witherspoon is behind the project as an executive producer, alongside Mbatha-Raw herself.
"I first met Reese when we did A Wrinkle in Time, and then, obviously, The Morning Show, which I got to do with Apple, and [Witherspoon's production company] Hello Sunshine was such an amazing experience for me," Mbatha-Raw said. "When I got the script for this, I knew Hello Sunshine was already attached to produce... I feel like Reese leads by example. What she's done, what she's built, the fact that they invited me onboard to be a part of this process on an executive level. I just look to her; she's very much my mentor."
Surface premieres Friday, July 29 on Apple TV+.
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