Kate Mara takes on another political death as she stars as Kopechne
Chappaquiddick gives her chance to deliver justice for Kennedy victim, says Kathryn Shattuck
Kate Mara isn’t on screen much in Chappaquiddick, John Curran’s account of the maelstrom surrounding 18 July, 1969, when Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy drove his Oldsmobile off a narrow bridge into a pond on the island, leaving the scene and his passenger, Mary Jo Kopechne, who died. And effectively killing his presidential aspirations.
As Kopechne, Mara was determined to find justice for a campaign aide who, after her death, was reduced by some to a groupie who was having an affair with the married Kennedy, played here by Jason Clarke.
“Like a lot of people, I’m fascinated with the Kennedys and their history and their achievements and the tragic stories that follow them,” Mara said. But she insisted on portraying Kopechne “as the brilliant, hard-working woman that she was and not just some tabloid story”.
It isn’t the first time Mara’s character has suffered at the hand of politics. As the dogged reporter Zoe Barnes in House of Cards, she slept with the House majority whip, Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), who pushed her in front of a train once he was tagged for the vicepresidency.
This summer, she’ll play a 1980s New Jersey housewife whose husband works for the Trump organisation in FX’S Pose.
Mara, 35 – chatty in bare feet in the Manhattan apartment where she is living with her husband, Jamie Bell, and her elderly Boston terrier, Bruno – discussed her harrowing scenes as Kopechne and the sexual assault allegations against Spacey. Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.
0 Kate Mara wants Mary Jo Kopechne to be remembered presidential campaign. Their office was boiling hot because there were no windows. They’d be down there for hours working their asses off.
Q AQAHow did you make sure you weren’t playing into the rumours surrounding Kopechne? She achieved so much, and she was only 28 when she died. She started out as a teacher, and then she went on to play a very important role in Bobby Kennedy’s campaign. So I wanted to make sure that she wasn’t shown as just some rumoured fling that Ted Kennedy might have had. The official finding was “death by drowning”. But some have speculated that she suffocated as the water rose in Kennedy’s car over several hours. What was that like to shoot? Horrible. (Laughs grimly) We shot in a car that was flipped upside down in an underwater tank, and it was being held up by wires. And they would submerge it a little bit more, then a little bit more, and the car filled up with water over time. They had one of the doors off so I could swim underneath and get to the bottom half of the car where the actual air pockets were. And I had this amazing stunt team of ex-navy SEALS that were under there protecting me in case anything goes wrong. It it wasn’t fun. At all.
AMurphy’s Pose, about the 1980s ball culture. The show is said to have the largest LGBT cast of any scripted series. It’s pretty mental how many characters we have, and it keeps growing with each episode. It’s so fantastic when you open a script and see all the characters’ names, and most of them are trans.
Q AI have to ask about House of Cards and working with Kevin Spacey. I had a really amazing experience on that show for the 13 episodes I was on it.