At 56, Catherine Zeta-Jones is finally using her real accent on screen - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Catherine Zeta-Jones's new revenge thriller has an almost cartoonish element "like Tom and Jerry". (Supplied: Stan/Unai Mateo)

It was an Australian who convinced Catherine Zeta-Jones to take on her latest role.

About five years ago, Peter Lawson, the Sydney-born executive producer of Spotlight and John Wick, sent Zeta-Jones the crime book The Price You Pay by Aidan Truhen.

It's the story of American cocaine dealer Jack Price, who finds himself the target of a hit by an international terrorist organisation.

As compelling as Zeta-Jones found the book, there was one glaring problem: The Price You Pay didn't have a woman lead.

Zeta-Jones recalls asking Lawson: "Peter, I presume you're going to change the central character to a woman?"

Sure enough, Jack Price became Jackie Price for the new action TV series Kill Jackie.

"Once I thought about the character being a woman and the craziness and the dark humour in the original book's character, I went, 'This is really interesting,'" Zeta-Jones says.

Jackie Price is a former cocaine smuggler turned glamorous yet shadowy art dealer, who, 20 years after she left the drug game, is pursued by a group of assassins known as the Seven Demons.

The demons have a scorched-earth policy, destroying not only Jackie's home and art collection, and stealing all her money, but coming after anyone associated with her.

Jackie goes on the run with her tax accountant Sam (Daniel Ings; Scrotal Recall) and assistant Charlie (Australian actor Hattie Hook; Ten Pound Poms), before she decides to hunt the assassins herself.

Sebastian Armesto (left) as The Cuban, one of the Seven Demons, with Daniel Ings as Jackie's accountant Sam. (Supplied: Stan/Unai Mateo)

The show moves rapidly from action to comedy to drama, Zeta-Jones explains.

"It took us a long time to get the tone right, but it was worth it," she says.

"I enjoyed playing Jackie Price more than I've enjoyed playing many characters."

Zeta-Jones unlocked the character once she and screenwriters Tom Butterworth and Conor Keane decided Jackie Price was Welsh.

"It opened up another world," she says.

That makes Kill Jackie the first time 56-year-old Zeta-Jones has been able to use her real Welsh accent on screen, more than 40 years into her career.

"We needed something to ground her," she says. "I was going to do a bit of a Cockney accent or something, and then one day I just went, 'This woman's Welsh.'"

Catherine Zeta-Jones with co-star Darci Shaw. (Supplied: Stan/Unai Mateo)

The actor saw in the character the "earthiness and grit" of Welsh women she knew, both the people she grew up with and those she saw in popular culture, like Total Eclipse of the Heart singer Bonnie Tyler.

"Not that the [Welsh women I know are] drug dealers or dubious art dealers, but there's something about this character that was really familiar to me," Zeta-Jones says.

It gave her the freedom to focus on Jackie's nuances — "a little quirky, a little off" — instead of the accent, while still playing her as a "powerful, determined woman".

Catherine Zeta-Jones based her character on some of her mother's friends. She is pictured with co-star Óscar Jaenada in Kill Jackie. (Supplied: Stan/Unai Mateo)

It also gave the writers the opportunity to take the character back to the Swansea council estate where she grew up.

"We could see her vulnerable, see why she did what she did, why she needed to get out of this situation," Zeta-Jones says.

In 2005, Zeta-Jones said "one of my biggest problems when I first started" was a lack of "movies for Welsh lasses".

Instead of playing Welsh characters like Jackie, she began her career in musical theatre, on London's West End, when she was just nine years old, playing the quietest orphan, July, in Annie.

Then, at 16, she landed the lead role of aspiring actor Peggy Sawyer in the musical 42nd Street.

By 2002, she was starring opposite Renée Zellweger in the movie adaptation of the musical Chicago, as the murderous but fame-hungry Velma Kelly, which landed her an Oscar for best supporting actress.

Catherine Zeta-Jones plays a convicted murderer in Chicago, vying for the attention of the press over Renée Zellweger's Roxie. (Supplied: Miramax)

"Playing Velma Kelly was a dream come true for me," Zeta-Jones says.

"I started out in musical theatre and never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that I would be able to put a musical on film, that it would turn out so great, and I would win an Oscar for it.

"I still can't believe it and it's nearly 25 years ago."

It feels like there are resonances between the roles of Velma Kelly and Jackie Price, both effortlessly glamorous women who have killed people who "had it coming", as Velma sings in Cell Block Tango.

"I gravitate to these kinds of characters because they're unpredictable," Zeta-Jones says.

"Velma Kelly shot her husband and her sister, bang-bang, but you like her; you root for her.

"I wanted that for Jackie [too], because she's dangerous, but she has that James Bond element: licensed to kill, but charming and funny and quirky."

Kill Jackie feels like the latest in a spate of movies and TV shows where strong but messy women take matters into their own hands.

Those shows range from assassin series Killing Eve, which shares an executive producer with Kill Jackie, to recent woman serial killer thriller Furious.

Zeta-Jones credits the seeming growth in these kinds of roles for women partly to streaming services.

"There is more to go around, where women can step up to the plate, because there's more space for us," she says.

But the abundance of these kinds of roles is "circular", Zeta-Jones says, nodding to the heroines of 70s movies, played by the likes of American actors Gena Rowlands (A Woman Under the Influence) and Ellen Burstyn (Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore).

"They're really fleshed-out, gritty women, and then [the industry] went through a period of blah," she explains, describing a period where women were often limited to playing the ingenue, like the role she played in The Legend of Zorro.

Now, there's more opportunities to play "fully fledged" women, "warts and all", like Jackie Price.

"I like to keep people on their toes when they look at a character that I do," Catherine Zeta-Jones says. (Supplied: Stan/Unai Mateo)

"That's what I love about Jackie," Zeta-Jones says.

"You see Jackie outside the Guggenheim [in Bilbao] and you go, 'Wow, femme fatale!', and then she opens her mouth and you go, 'That doesn't really sound like I thought she would sound'.

"Next minute, I'm biting off a man's ear, looking like a crazy person in a hospital gown and furry slippers."

The actor reckons those are the kinds of women characters audiences want to see today.

"They like to see more than just the one-dimensional 'hot chick who's got a gun'," Zeta-Jones says.

"Meh. It doesn't really work like that, you know?"

Kill Jackie is streaming on Stan from October 2.