It’s taken nearly 40 years but Jamie Lee Curtis has done what no one else could: Bring Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta award-winning book series which debuted in 1990 to the screen.

This Wednesday, all 8 episodes of “Scarpetta” stream on Prime  with Nicole Kidman, 58, as Virginia Medical Examiner Kay Scarpetta and Curtis, 67, her trainwreck elder sister Dorothy Farinelli.

Curtis recalled in a Zoom interview how, looking to do a TV series, she was reading a lot of books. “I went, wait a minute, what about Scarpetta!?”

Cornwell told her, “No one at the time had the rights. I recognized that her long career as a great writer has never been brought to a screen and thought it was time to do so.”

As for Kidman?

“Nicole was the one who said to me, ‘You’re going to be in the show, right?’ I was like, Yes! of course. So we figured out I would play Dorothy, her sister, which was never my intention. That happened because of Nicole. Of course, it turned into this incredibly fun part.”

That’s an understatement. We’ve never seen Curtis play such a wild, unabashedly out there woman. A train wreck, yes, but don’t even try to look away.

“She’s out of control,” Curtis allowed. “Her unbridled out of control-ness is her response to the amount of death in her life, in the same way that Scarpetta is in intense control in how she has metabolized death.

“There’s the beautiful split of two sisters who both have suffered a violent death of their parent. One has just gone off the rails, and one has stayed completely on the rails. That’s the beautiful dynamic there.”

As for Dorothy perpetually getting up close, demanding, stoned, “She likes her alcohol. But I don’t know if we’d categorize her as an alcoholic. She is a man eater. She uses sex and men as another tool to escape herself.

“She also likes to shop, to cause trouble. And she likes to poke the bear. Dorothy is very good at poking the bear.”

As for her daughter Lucy?

“That’s a fascinating relationship. When we were casting, Nicole, Bobby Cannavale and Simon Baker were already in. We were looking for Lucy, whose father is Cuban. So Ariana DeBose’s name came up and it was, ‘We will never get her.’

“I was friends with her — I had her number. In the middle of shooting ‘Freakier Friday’ I texted Ari: ‘Hey, I’m doing a TV series with Nicole Kidman for Amazon, based on the Patricia Cornwell book series about Kay Scarpetta. Would you like to play Lucy my daughter?’

“She wrote back Yes. That’s how she’s in the show.”

Prime streams all 8 episodes of “Scarpetta” on March 11

Jamie Lee Curtis as Dorothy Farinelli in “Scarpetta.” (Photo

Connie Chornuk / Prime)