Amanda Seyfried landed a dream role with her latest project.

Speaking with PEOPLE, the actress, 39, says that she was immediately drawn to her new role as police officer Mickey Fitzpatrick on the new Peacock limited series Long Bright River.

“I’ve always wanted to play a cop,” Seyfried says. “It’s like a childhood dream to play somebody that I just was always in awe of, even though it’s funny [because] I’m not good with authority.”

Long Bright River, adapted from Liz Moore’s 2020 novel of the same name, follows Mickey, who works in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. After three women are found dead, Mickey jumps on the case, as well as the search for her missing sister Casey (Ashleigh Cummings).

Moore, who serves as an executive producer on the series alongside Seyfried and showrunner Nikki Toscano, notes the complexities of Mickey’s character, particularly as it pertains to her job. Long Bright River questions the perception of police in a community affected by the opioid crisis.

“One of the facets of her character is that she’s actually not that talented as a police officer. The police work does not come naturally to her,” Moore tells PEOPLE. “In some ways, I think she was meant to do something else, but the circumstances of her life have combined to make police work what she’s doing at this moment.”

Seyfried says that playing a character like Mickey was appealing for her as an actor, as it provided her with a range of material to work with.

”This is a girl that has got a lot of issues, a lot of traumas,” Seyfried says. “She’s a cop, she has a kid, she’s a single mother, and she’s flexing and trying to get by and she has all these responsibilities. It just seemed like it was chaos for her.”

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“That’s attractive to me because it’s attractive to me to have a lot of balls in the air as a character…very specific parameters are really fun because it’s like a puzzle for me,” she adds. “I need a lot of guidance and a lot of information, and I like studying things and I just love going into worlds that I don’t know. For me, it’s the journey…I need to make sure that I’m not going to get bored while I’m away from my kids.”

Seyfried, who is set to star in and executive produce the upcoming film adaptation of Freida McFadden’s novel The Housemaid, also highlights the importance of telling the community’s stories authentically. Though the show was not filmed in Kensington, the team incorporated on-set consultants from within the community and also cast local actors.

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“It just grounds it to a whole other level, and you can’t really find TV this grounded in reality these days. It’s just a really rare experience for me as an actor on a set like this,” she says.

”There was just so much care in telling the story in the right way…We can see ourselves in each of these people, and that’s the point of storytelling, is to share and relate.”

Long Bright River is now streaming on Peacock.