Mare Of Easttown

‘I’ d be a lousy detective !’

Kate Winslet produces and stars in this seven-part crime drama following small-town Pennsylvania detective Mare Sheehan (Winslet) as she investigates a local murder. Stricken with grief following her son’s suicide, her pain leads her to develop an obsession with various cases of missing and murdered girls. Fully aware of her situation, rumours swirl around her in the small community, but will that affect her pursuit of a killer?

Kate, how did you get involved in Mare Of Easttown?

I think I was sent episodes one and two around the end of 2018. Mare is nothing like me but I was excited to read something that just gripped me right away. I really felt the sense of not just who Mare was, but the world that she lives in, where she comes from, that sense of community, being so entrenched in a society that you sort of forget who you are from time to time, and the sense of responsibility and burdens really, really intrigued me.

Do you think you would be a good detective?

No, I’d be a lousy detective! I’d be very good at the coffee and the after-beers but this character, in many ways, she felt a million miles away from me, which she is, in terms of the job that she does. I could never be a detective. I don’t think I have the mental stamina that is required. I have stamina, but in a different way. She’s a difficult person to live with from time to time but it doesn’t change the fact that her love for her family is the thing that bolts her down and drives her in life and is her number one priority. And that was something that I was able to connect with in the midst of all these other things that were so far removed from myself.

Did you binge on any crime dramas?

I actually deliberately didn’t. It’s such a good question, actually, because it was a real dilemma for me. Not knowing this world at all, well, where can you find those things? TV shows. But what I did do was I watched a lot of real crime drama and a lot of YouTube footage. We really wanted to capture the essence of what it’s like to really be a detective from that town. It’s a place that really exists. The people there were just wonderful and so incredibly helpful with everything we had to do. And if anything ever felt fake or phony, we would say, ‘Tell us, please tell us right away.’