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In her first big television role in a decade, Kate Winslet is a cop struggling with a murder inquiry – and a frantic personal life
Mother, grandmother, daughter, detective, lover, sporting hero... Mare Sheehan wears an awful lot of hats in Sky’s absorbing seven-part crime drama Mare Of Easttown.
And for Oscar-winner Kate Winslet, who takes on the role of Mare and is also the show’s executive producer, her first leading part in a TV drama since the awardladen Mildred Pierce a decade ago was a challenge like no other.
‘I almost became Mare – and I don’t think I was nice to live with,’ says Kate. ‘I crossed the line between reality and fiction, and became totally immersed in her.’
The seven-time Oscar nominee is hoping audiences become just as immersed in the world of Mare, who is juggling her career as a cop in Easttown, Pennsylvania, with a complicated home life.
At work, her boss urgently wants her to find a young woman called Katie who’s been missing for a year. The woman’s mother has been putting up posters and making a TV appeal highlighting the failings of the police investigation.
Meanwhile, a drug-addicted burglar is on the rampage, and it’s Mare’s job to chase him across town, calm him and find him a bed for the night.
As if that wasn’t enough, her caseload also includes a prowler on the loose and – by the end of the first episode – a dead body. The murder investigation that follows leads to out-of-town detective Colin Zabel (Evan Peters) being drafted in. Mare’s not happy with this outsider, and the relationship becomes so strained that Zabel asks Mare’s daughter Siobhan for advice on how best to work with her.
Home life for Mare is no less frantic. She lives with her mother Helen, daughter Siobhan and grandson Drew. She’s also struggling with the suicide of her son.
In the opening episode, her exhusband marks his engagement to his girlfriend with a party, while a grumpy Mare attends another celebration, marking 25 years since her brilliant shot won the state basketball championship for the Easttown Hawks and earned her the nickname Lady Hawk.
But, while she’s waiting to be introduced to the sports fans, Mare has a ding-dong with the mother of missing Katie. She does a runner to the nearest bar where she meets writer Richard Ryan (Guy Pearce) – and they share a round of drinks before getting passionate.
Kate Winslet says she was gripped by the scripts for Mare Of Easttown. ‘I was intrigued by the world Mare lives in, that sense of community, being so entrenched in a society that you sort of forget who you are from time to time, and also by the sense of responsibility she carries,’ she says.
‘The scripts came to me at a time when I was looking for something to consume me... and it certainly did.’ n
Tim Oglethorpe Mare Of Easttown begins on Monday at 9pm on Sky Atlantic.