Winslet strives to get things right
In fall 2019, Kate Winslet first showed up in Philadelphia to learn the ways of Mare Sheehan, the suburban police detective she plays in “Mare of Easttown,” a seven-episode murder mystery now airing Sundays on HBO.
She drank the Wawa coffee, studied the accent and hung out with police officers, learning not only how to handle a gun but also how to talk about obtaining evidence for a murder investigation in a way that might not drive actual investigators crazy.
“I’m an actor who doesn’t like to get things wrong,” she said, laughing, when asked why achieving a Delco-worthy accent was so important to her.
“I think it was a challenge she wanted to nail,” creator and executive producer Brad Ingelsby said of the accent, the nuances of which will probably be lost on viewers outside of the Philly area.
Winslet would just as soon the audience not notice it too much, either.
“The really tricky part of doing a dialect is making it disappear. So the audience doesn’t hear you’re doing like a voice,” said the British-born Oscar winner, who worked with her longtime dialect coach, Susan Hegarty.
“There were a lot of things I could have really leant into that would have made it sound like I was doing something a bit gimmicky, and I didn’t want that to happen,” she said. “So I just had to drill it and drill it and drill it.”
Her character Mare is a divorced mother (and grandmother) who’s mourning the loss of her son to suicide and struggling to keep what’s left of her family together while a town threatens to turn against her over her failure to find a missing girl.
“Her determination to love and take care of the people in her life who mean the most to her came before everything else. And I loved that about her. That, to me, made this not just a small-town murder story,” Winslet said.
Conveying Mare’s grief required its own preparation, she said, including “working with a grief therapist, and also spending time with individuals who have lost either children or loved ones to suicide.”
The character was also an opportunity to counter what Winslet sees as “unrealistic or unattainable ideals” of what women should look like on screen.
“I think that now as audiences we’re craving real stories about real people. And the closer to reality I was able to get in playing Mare, the more truthful it was and the more it meant to me,” she said. “It was very,
very important that I was (wearing) no makeup. This is a woman who has not been to the hair salon since her son died. Hence 4 inches of very visible regrowth that you see. …
“After all of these years,” she said, “I didn’t really know, I suppose, that it was going to be possible for me to experience any more maybe truly immersive experiences like perhaps I’d had on ‘Mildred Pierce’ or on ‘The Reader,’ for example, or ‘Revolutionary Road.’ And Mare just took it to a whole other level.”
May 2 birthdays: Singer Englebert Humperdinck is 85. Singer Larry Gatlin is 73. Singer Lou Gramm is 71. Actor Christine Baranski is 69. Singer Angela Bofill is 67. TV commentator Mika Brzezinski is 54. Actor Dwayne Johnson (The Rock) is 49. Actor Ellie Kemper is 41. Actor Gaius Charles is 38. Singer Lily Allen is 36.