"You get to be the president and it's like now what am I supposed to do?" Davis says, referring to her turn on the critically acclaimed but mismanaged drama series Commander-in-Chief. "So I have been very picky waiting for stuff that I feel is worth it."

When the script for Jeremy Slater's reboot of The Exorcist came to her, she says her reaction was immediate. "It's a case of just reading something and saying, oh I want to do that," she says. "This was a brilliant writer creating fantastic characters for all of us. All of the characters are very complicated and multi-layered."

Davis plays Angela Rance, the mother of a young girl who succumbs to demonic possession. Details of Davis' character were kept deliberately vague in the lead-up to the launch of the US series because of an as-yet-unrevealed layer of detail.

"I get a lot to do in the pilot, and I'm going to get a hell of a lot to do as this series goes on because I know some things about what's going on," she says.

Davis says she had no fear in taking on a genre show. "I've done every genre in movies including horror," she says. "I love every genre. And I love horror movies. The Exorcist was absolutely my scariest experience, scarred for life as a child like everybody."

Equally, she had no qualms about stepping into an expanded universe based on one of the most iconic films of all time.

"Are we worried at all because the movie is so revered and [we] couldn't improve upon it? The answer is no," she says. "But I think to me one of the super coolest things about it is that it's the same world where that did take place. So we acknowledge in the pilot that that did happen but it's now decades ago."

Davis' co-star, British actor Ben Daniels, plays Father Marcus Keane in the series. Asked whether it is best described as a horror drama or a theological drama, he says it falls clearly into the first category.

"It sort of induces feelings of fear and dread, so if that happens to me, it's horror," he says. "I love horror, so I don't think it's something you should shy away from. But it's also a theological piece as well, it asks, what is faith, what is good, what is bad, all those things will hopefully be explored."

Keane enters the story as a Catholic priest who has worked as an exorcist for four decades. "He did his first one aged 11, and he's from quite a violent working-class background," Daniels says. "A traumatic event has left him with this pent-up rage, which he can use in his work, but it also makes him quite abrupt and abrasive as a human being."

Though the series does delve into the historical canon of The Exorcist franchise, it leans more on the original novel, written by William Peter Blatty, than the preceding films and their various spin-offs and sequels.

"I'd seen the movie a few times before I'd really, properly read the novel and what I thought was improvisation in the movie is actually there in the novel," Daniels says. "I was like, wow, those actors weren't improvising, they're saying lines.

"Both the movie and the novel live in a very real world," Daniels adds. "It's not a comic book world. We wanted that ... Rupert Wyatt, the [pilot] director, made sure we had one foot firmly rooted in the truth at all times, from how it looks as a piece and how we act in it. He set a really clear template for us to work with"

WHAT The Exorcist

WHEN Showcase, Sunday, December 4, 8.30pm