Rachel Weisz has told how she has previously suffered a miscarriage

Asked if she was surprised about the response to some of the childbirth scenes in the Amazon Prime Video series, Rachel told Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel on 'The News Agents' podcast: "I think I probably was surprised because I was just telling this story about the female experience, and it didn't seem to have been like heightened or overdramatised.

"There isn't music to make it more dramatic, it is quite simple and photographed in quite a straightforward way.

"So yes, I was surprised. Women have miscarriages, I've had a miscarriage, so you suddenly you see blood coming out of your body and these are just all part of a female experience of being alive.

"So, we're not used to it. I think we're not used to seeing any of those things being represented cinematically or fictionally. So maybe this is breaking some new ground this show."

Rachel - who plays twin gynaecologists in the show - believes some have criticised the scenes because they are not used to seeing childbirth portrayed on TV or in movies.

She said: "I think we've gotten very used to watching portrayals of men who tie up, strangle, dismember, rape women and that's just a kind of ordinary TV show.

"You know 'Silence of the Lambs' in the 90s, a man who has thrown women into a pit and was fattening them up so he could then take off their skins and make a new body for himself.

"I think there's a vast cinematic language in many different tones about violence, about death, about shooting, about legs coming off, blood spurting ...

"In fictional representations, we're just completely used to that. Murder, death, violence, gore, spurting blood, young women being tied up, raped, beaten, but seeing a baby's head come out of a woman, either through a C-section through her belly, or from her vagina is ... that's just the female experience. I mean, for women that do have babies."

The British star - who lives in the US - also hit out at anti-abortion activists who support the death penalty.

Rachel - who has four-year-old daughter Grace with Daniel, 55, and son Henry, 16, with her ex Darren Aronofsky, 54 - added: "Both ends of life have different rules, it is very strange.

"Children have to be born but there's going to be no free health care for them.

"There's no free schooling for children under the age of five. And now every day, there seems to be more and more of a chance that you might get shot by an assault rifle at school.

"You can take life at the end of life; the government can choose to say you deserve to die. But at the beginning of life a woman has no choice. How do you rationalise that?"

Listen to the full interview on The News Agents podcast on the Global Player - https://www.globalplayer.com/podcasts/42KuVj/