After two critical and popular HBO hits, Kate Winslet hopes the third time’s the charm with Sunday night’s satirical series “The Regime.”

Winslet first scored with HBO in the 2011 miniseries version of James M. Cain’s ‘40s noir “Mildred Pierce” and again a decade later with the intense blue-collar melodrama “Mare of Easttown.”

“The Regime” couldn’t be farther from those entries’ realism with its fictional Central European setting ruled solely by Winslet’s authoritarian Chancellor Elena Vernham.

“We were given this extraordinary story that constantly peeked behind the curtain,” Winslet, 48, said earlier this week in a virtual press conference from HBO’s Hudson Yards Manhattan headquarters.

It’s a hard time for this former physician who lives inside a palace bubble, completely insulated from the outside world. Increasingly paranoid and unstable, and despite having an ineffectual French husband, Elena begins an intense relationship with an equally unstable soldier Zubak (Belgium’s Matthias Schoenaerts) that threatens her reign.

“Trying to figure out how to play her,” Winslet said, “was very much an angst-ridden part of the process.”

One way was via Elena’s long-dead father in scenes where she talks to his body (preserved in the palace!). That was Winslet’s key to playing her.

“We were lucky because when this started, they sent everything” – all the scripts – “and the universe was so intact. That helped enormously because the tone was established right away and we understood what was required of us actors. We could play the way we wanted to and lean into the absurdist side.

“What I needed to do,” she said dramatically, “was get (expletive) brave actually.

“The show was originally called ‘The Palace’ and we’ve had recent recreations of British monarchs.  If you put me in the role and people know how I sound I was worried the audience would figure out in the first episode where they were. So I leaned right into the scene with her father.

“For a daughter to keep the corpse of her father and go have chats gave me the space to explore her backstory.

“Then we talked a lot about if I did something — and that was the idea of dressing in grotesque, overtly sexual ways. It was a long process and there was also this unexpected, twisted, really beautiful love story between these two misfits.

“There’s something touching about Elena and Zubak together. The two of us, we had to make sure we were finding a rhythm and energy for them that was intriguing as well as bizarre. That was the balance.

“So there were times I’d say, ‘Can I just do something funny?’ And the director would say, ‘Go ahead!’”

HBO streams the first of six episodes of “The Regime” March 3