By KARA MAYER ROBINSON
Feb. 11, 2015 8:06 p.m. ET
Uma Thurman ’s on-screen personas, including the underworld boss’s wife in “Pulp Fiction” and the sword-savvy avenger in the “Kill Bill” movies, have an air of mystery.
Off-screen, the 44-year-old is similarly enigmatic.
“I’m just an actress,” she said. “People always talk about wanting a private life. I think there’s wanting one, and then there’s actually trying to have it.”
But Ms. Thurman, who lives in Manhattan, is open when it comes to her work. That includes “The Slap,” an NBC miniseries that has its premiere on Thursday.
Based on the book by Christos Tsiolkas, the television show also stars Peter Sarsgaard, Thandie Newton, Melissa George and Zachary Quinto. The first episode starts off with a bang, as friends and family gather for a birthday party.
When a boy haphazardly swings a bat near other children, a man who isn’t his father slaps him across the face. The rest of the eight-episode series explores the aftermath.
Ms. Thurman plays Anouk Latham, a friend of the boy’s mother.
“My character is so annoyed by the whole thing,” she said. “It’s not that she agrees with the slap. It’s that she didn’t think the slap should’ve been turned into a federal case.”
The story’s complexity appealed to Ms. Thurman.
“It diverges and shows how different people’s lives string together, both loosely and tightly,” she said. “So often, so much more is going on with people than we narcissistically or solipsistically imagine, because we’re so caught up in our own stuff.”
Michael Morris, who directed Ms. Thurman in the show’s third episode, said she is a very soulful actress. “She came up with this emotion and focus right in the middle of an incredibly technical venture. It feels to me like she’s incredibly at home on camera.”
Ms. Thurman grew up in Massachusetts and was drawn to acting at an early age. “I was 16, 15. I was very into my English-lit classes. That’s the age where you read Chekhov and you read Ibsen and you read some Shakespeare,” she said. “I was fascinated by character and psychology and people.”
As a teenager, she got her first role in a small-budget film called “Kiss Daddy Goodnight.” Eventually came films large and small (“Batman & Robin,” “Sweet and Lowdown,” “The Producers”).
Ms. Thurman won’t commit to a favorite film, though she admits a predilection for her work with Quentin Tarantino, which includes “Pulp Fiction” and “Kill Bill.” More recently, she appeared in the 2014 Lars von Trier film “Nymphomaniac: Vol. 1,” in a seven-minute scene that garnered critical praise.
“It was a nice welcome-back reception,” she said.
Ms. Thurman’s work became tangential as she sharpened her focus on her children—two, ages 16 and 13, from her previous marriage to actor Ethan Hawke, and a third, 2 years old, with financier Arpad Busson. “Making a family, raising young children—and then the stresses of also being very independent in doing that—comes with its distractions,” she said.
Now that her family is more stable and she has “reached some endpoints” in her life, Ms. Thurman feels more entitled to work. But she hesitates to focus too much on herself, which she sees as a hazard of the job.
“Actors are notoriously self-involved people. The likelihood that I am not self-involved, given my job and career, is probably very slim,” she said. “I have done the obligatory many years of therapy, as all New Yorkers do. I don’t feel like some evolved person. It’s all such a work in progress.”
