Helena Bonham Carter enjoyed playing an "alcoholic psychiatrist" in her upcoming film.

The 45-year-old actress stars as Dr. Julia Hoffman in director Tim Burton's horror Dark Shadows.

Helena had a good time playing such a multidimensional character.

"I mean, Dr. Hoffman's an alcoholic psychiatrist, so I hadn't played that before," she told MTV News at the Britannia Awards this week. "And she's got a secret. They all have secrets. It's all about people who have secrets."

The secret behind Tim's directorial inspiration for this film was not difficult for Helena to uncover. Helena, who has been in a relationship with Tim since 2001 and has two children with him, knew immediately why the director wanted to pursue this project.

"[The original 1960s Dark Shadows television series] is a thing he raced home to see when he was about age ten, so it's returning to his childhood roots of what he loved watching," she explained. "It's actually a really bad, hilariously bad soap opera, and because it's so bad, he felt he had to make a hugely expensive movie."

Helena believes this feature is so out of the box it may be difficult to classify.

"It's going to be unlike [anything], I think. It's dangerous to say that. But it's very original and it's kind of uncategorisable. It's going to be impossible to sell, frankly, because it's just so... it's a soap opera, but it's very, very subtle. I don't know. We'll see. It's a ghost story, but then it's an unhappy vampire story, it's a mixture of so many different things and a real ensemble piece. Hopefully it will be funny. I don't know."

Dark Shadows is scheduled to be released in May 2012.