Kate Mara Says You Shouldn't Be Comfortable Watching 'A Teacher'

Kate Mara‘s brand new FX series, A Teacher, just debuted this week and has some advice for fans watching.

“Some people are definitely going to feel uncomfortable watching the show,” the 37-year-old actress revealed to The Wrap in a new interview.

The series centers on a high school teacher who has a sexual relationship with her 17-year-old student, Eric (Nick Robinson).

Kate adds that the show “wasn’t something that we made thinking that it would be a super-easy watch. Comfortable is not the word we were going for.”

“I would say that shows that I am most attracted to and wowed by are shows that make me a little uncomfortable, or very uncomfortable,” she continued. “Watching ‘The Sopranos’ was not necessarily comfortable for me because there’s so much murder and all of those kind of things. So to me as an actor, and as a viewer, that’s not something that scares me, you know what I’m saying? But it’s not a story that we were looking to tell to make people feel cozy. It’s an important story to tell in order to begin the conversation about how common this type of sexual assault has become. So that was more of the goal.”

“There’s that silly like stereotype of it being cool for a boy to have that illegal relationship with their teacher — which is obviously not what we’re saying in any way shape or form in this show,” Kate emphasized about the groundbreaking show. “But I think it is a unique thing to explore it and it was something that we wanted to be very clear about from the beginning, that we were not saying that it was right, that we were always saying this was wrong.”

“[It's] important to explore the story from both perspectives, not just Claire’s, but also Eric’s and how it really alters his life.”

A Teacher is streaming now on Hulu.

If you missed it, Kate recently opened up about her relationship with husband, Jamie Bell. See what she shared here…