OSCAR, Emmy and Golden Globe winner Kate Winslet is back in a new HBO crime drama, Mare Of Easttown.
In the seven-part limited series, the British actress plays a small-town Pennsylvania detective who investigates a murder while trying to keep her own life from crumbling.
Mare Of Easttown is an exploration into the dark side of a close community and an examination of how family and past tragedies can define the present.
Below, Winslet talks about the edgy show, which also stars Guy Pearce, Julianne Nicholson, Jean Smart and David Denman.
How did Mare Of Easttown come about?
It was a bizarre time actually. It was September 2018, I was filming in the UK and in the space of a month I was sent the script for Ammonite and episodes one and two of Mare. I ended up saying yes to both of these huge, great jobs. I was very, very excited to work with HBO again – I had done Mildred Pierce with them and had a really, really amazing experience. I read the script and it was like a middle-aged actress' dream, quite honestly. I actually hate that term, but I am 45 now. I'm not 20 anymore. And when I read Mare, I knew how lucky I was to be asked to read something that could have been offered to an American actress, for example. The writing was utterly real and wonderful and I could feel myself saying those words. That's always a real indicator for me: I always sort of read bits out loud when I'm reading a script and play around – I'll say to my son or daughter, 'just come and quickly read this scene with me.' And then I'll get that feeling of, 'Ooh, this could be good. This could be good.' With Mare I had that feeling right away. So I was flattered, initially, to get the offer but also really taken by the challenges.
What were those challenges?
This is a piece that is set in Delaware County outside of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania. It's set in a different country to mine and it's a totally different character to me or anything I've ever done before. I mean, I've never been to Delaware County before doing this project. There's a very specific dialect that people have from Delco, and that was another contributing factor for me – like, Oh my God, I've got to, once again, learn another whole different American accent! I love doing an accent but it's a particularly tricky one.
Who is Mare Sheehan?
She is a character who has been a pillar of the community for a great number of years. She's a Sergeant detective – she's a good Sergeant detective – but a girl had gone missing a year previously, Katie Bailey, and she was in her early twenties. And Katie was the daughter of another local woman who's an old friend of Mare's. Everyone knows everyone round Easttown so all eyes have been on Mare to find Katie – and she hasn't. They don't know whether she's dead or alive or what happened to her. They have no clue. In addition to that Mare, when she was 16 years old, was responsible for making a winning shot in a national girls' basketball championship. It's the town's claim to fame. And every year there is a ceremony around the time that this great thing happened 25 years ago. Mare is held aloft in front of the whole town and everyone hails her as this great hero, but she doesn't feel like any of those things. She just wants to curl up and disappear half of the time, but she just has to keep going.
Do expand on the story...
Well it's about a small town murder, and there's a cliffhanger at the end of every hour. I was just gripped by it episode after episode – you know, that wonderful thing that you're supposed to feel when you watch a drama about a murder, and they're trying to find the killer, the who-done-it of it all is utterly compelling. I just found it to be a very, very clever story of its type.
Except it's not just a crime story. It's actually more about community and mercy and compassion and grief; and how real people live and cope with real things and how those real things are not always happy-making, you know? They can be very challenging. Family dynamics can shift and change based on something that might have happened in the past or something that's happening in the present.
How did you prepare physically for the role?
I knew it was going to be a huge challenge. It was a massive shoot. There were 124 days of it and Covid-19 cut right in the middle. I played this character for well over a year plus five months of prep. I had to stay very fit. Not because we necessarily have to see a fit body or anything like that, but just because I did have to do a lot of running in the film. I had to physically do a lot of tackling and fighting and challenging and arresting people, taking huge, grown men down to the ground. But also, with the length of the shoot, I had to be constantly a little bit like an athlete in training for something. That doesn't mean that I was actually physically training, but I did a lot of very long bike rides, try and cycle 20km a day or something like that. I mean, nothing major, you know, it doesn't actually take that long to do that! But I had to just be healthy, and sharp with it. The thing was it's nice to sense that she was once strong in her youth, but isn't necessarily like that now. I didn't want to make her like an impossible superhuman, 40-something-year old. Mostly women aren't like that – we do what we can in the midst of the juggle of everything else. So I wanted to be that demographic as well. For me though, I just had to keep myself well in order to get through it, because it was such a massive job.
What research did you do?
I spent a lot of time with the real Easttown police department and Marple township, where they're right next door to each other. There was a collective of Sergeant detectives and police officers who really, really helped me. But one in particular was a woman named Christine Blaylor. She's like this pocket rocket, pint-sized, extraordinary, fierce, female Sergeant detective. She had a life, not exactly like Mare's, but similar in the sense that she had had a child very young and didn't have great prospects and needed to do something to give herself some degree of self-worth and purpose in life. She had bumped into a friend in a shopping mall when she was pushing her little kid around in a stroller at the age of 22 and this friend from the shopping mall had just graduated from the Police Academy. She thought, 'Huh, I could do that. I'm fit. I'm strong. I mean yeah, my kid's, like almost three years old now – give it another year and hell yeah, I'll just give that a go.' And so she did – and was one of only two women who graduated out of her class of 55 people. She's been a Sergeant detective to this day, and she's almost the same age as me. She was just incredible; very, very supportive. Whenever we had what I would call Police-y or Detective-y scenes that required proper detailed detective work, or if I was using a gun or something, she would always be absolutely there. She would say, 'Yeah, that's it – it's real. That's how it is.' And that was all I needed to hear.
Courtesy of HBO
Catch Mare of Easttown on Mondays at 10am on HBO GO and HBO (Astro Ch 411 HD).