Halle Berry has admitted she finds the intensity of shooting a TV show really hard work – especially when it includes drive-by breastfeeding sessions for her son.

The 48-year-old former Bond girl and mother-of-two returns as astronaut Molly Woods in the new season of sci-fi show Extant. Halle confessed she found the second season much easier, because during the first series she had still been breastfeeding her son Maceo.

Halle said: “TV is a whole lot of work. I mean, I’ve never worked so hard in my life than on the first series. I was nursing my baby too, so I was doing drive-by nursings every two hours and I was over my head. I’d thought, ‘I’m going to go into TV, be at home with my family’.

Halle Berry stars with David Morrissey in Extant
Halle Berry stars with David Morrissey in Extant (CBS)

“I didn’t see my family and I never worked harder in my life. So hats off to everybody who does television, because it’s a grind.

“The amount of scenes we shoot in a day, the things I had to memorise?! I really had to learn how to work that muscle of memorisation and I got it down for series two. So, without having the baby nursing as well, it was indelibly better.”

Halle welcomed Maceo with French actor husband Olivier Martinez in October 2013, and she also has a seven-year-old daughter Nahla from her relationship with French Canadian model Gabriel Aubry.

Halle Berry as Molly in Extant
Molly thought she couldn’t conceive but she has returned from 13 years in space pregnant (CBS)

In the first series of Extant, Molly was assigned a 13-month solo space mission, but returned home to her husband and their android son Ethan to discover she was inexplicably pregnant.

But Molly and Ethan have a strong mother-son bond, which Halle can relate to.

She explained: “Now that I have a son, I really do see the difference in the relationship, from having a little girl and having a boy and the special relationship that mothers and sons have. And I’m happy that this year Ethan and I get to continue to explore what that relationship might be with a twist, because he is a robot.”

Extant is available on Amazon Prime from Thursday, July 2.