Helen Hunt has been added to the cast of the Oakland-set Starz series adaptation of the 2018 film “Blindspotting,” and the Oscar-winning actress thinks that’s as good as it gets.

“PSYCHED,” Hunt tweeted in all caps on Wednesday, Dec. 2, linking to a post of the announcement on her Instagram account.

PSYCHEDhttps://t.co/ojj0jIrBPT

— Helen Hunt (@HelenHunt)December 2, 2020

“It is such an honor to have Helen Hunt in this series,” series co-star, executive producer and showrunner Rafael Casalsaid in a statement.“We became friends after she tweeted about her love of the film and we have long looked for a project to do together. She has been our first choice for the character Rainey since we dreamed this show up.”

Hunt, 57, who won the best actress Academy Award for the 1997 film “As Good As It Gets” opposite Jack Nicholson, will play the mother of Casal’s character, Miles, in the series produced by Lionsgate Television. The show’s premiere date on Starz, which is owned by Lionsgate, hasn’t been announced.

The eight-episode, half-hour first season of “Blindspotting,” which will be shot in Oakland and Los Angeles, began production Tuesday, Dec. 1.

The 2018 film about racial injustice was shot in Oakland and was written by and starred Oakland nativesDaveed Diggs and Casal.Along with producers Jess Wu Calder and Keith Calder, the four spent a decade getting the film, directed by Carlos López Estrada, made. Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle called it“one of the year’s great films.”

While the film centered on Miles and Collin as a pair of lifelong friends — one Black, one white — living in Oakland in a period of gentrification, the TV series shifts its focus to Ashley (Jasmine Cephas Jones, reprising her role from the film), the longtime partner of Miles, whose incarceration forces Ashley and their son Sean (Atticus Woodward) to move in with Miles’ mother (Hunt) and half-sister Trish (Jaylen Barron).

Candace Nicholas-Lippman plays Janelle, Ashley’s best friend.

Diggs, who is an executive producer along with Casal, Jones and the Calders, does not appear in the show (he is currently starring in the TNT series “Snowpiercer,” which premieres its second season in January), but is heavily involved.

“Figuring out a way to bring the Bay to life in a half-hour comedy space has been so rewarding,” Diggs said in a statement. “Ultimately, this is a story about how a broken prison system affects all of us and, like the film, we’re using comedy to talk about very real systemic effects in the country with the largest prison population in the world.”

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