Mare of Easttown
DRAMA Sky Atlantic HD, 9pm EDITOR’S CHOICE
Kate Winslet stars in this US crime drama as a detective investigating a local murder while trying to hold her own life together.
NEW
DRAMA
Mare of Easttown
Monday, Sky Atlantic HD, 9pm
IT’S BEEN A decade since Kate Winslet’s last foray into the world of TV in Sky Atlantic’s Mildred
Pierce. Now, the Oscar-winner is back on the small screen in a gripping US mystery thriller.
Winslet stars as small-town Pennsylvania detective Mare Sheehan, who’s struggling to get over the suicide of her son, Kevin, when she’s asked to investigate the grisly murder of a young mother, Erin Mcmenamin, who’s found dead in the local woods.
With a similar unsolved case from the past hanging over her and a battle for custody of Kevin’s young son, Drew, also on her mind, Mare quickly finds the line between her personal life and her police duties beginning to blur.
As Mare’s life starts to unravel, dark secrets from her close-knit community of Easttown begin to surface, but amid the trauma of her investigation she meets local writer Richard Ryan (played by Winslet’s
Mildred Pierce co-star Guy Pearce), and the pair form a romance.
We caught up with Winslet, 45, who won an Academy Award for Best Actress for the 2008 film The
Reader, to find out more about the powerful seven-part series…
WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT MARE?
She is the kind of woman I admire more than any other. She’s diligent, hard-working, trying her best to be a good friend, a good mother, a good grandmother and desperately not wanting to let people down. She’s living with a trauma and she hasn’t dealt with it, because the guilt she feels about it is so enormous. If she does confront it, it will consume her and she’ll crack.
HOW DO YOU FEEL ABOUT PLAYING A GRANDMOTHER AT THE AGE OF 45?
It certainly added a dimension that I’ve never played before, but I’m all about playing as many different things as possible.
HOW CHALLENGING DID YOU FIND PLAYING MARE?
Creating that trauma was the biggest challenge and I can barely even talk about it actually. I had to create such grief and sustain it for 20 months! We started shooting in September 2019 and were shut down in March 2020, but I still had to keep
Mare inside of me because we hadn’t finished. We went back again last autumn, so I feel like I’ve only just finished playing her. I still haven’t got her out of my head yet and I’m not sure I want to. I still have her brown coat hanging on a hook in my house and every now and then I’ll put it on and cook dinner – just to feel a bit like she’s still there.
WHAT KIND OF RESEARCH DID YOU DO FOR THE ROLE?
I worked alongside a grief therapist to really understand what that process of loss is like and I spent time with a lot of people who have lost either children or a loved one to suicide, which was obviously extremely upsetting. Layering up the trauma and charging myself up with it each morning was so tough and whenever the actor playing my son was on set I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I can’t even talk about it now. My kids would be like, ‘Mum, it’s not real!’
WHAT CAN YOU TELL US ABOUT MARE’S
HOMELIFE?
She lives with her mother, Helen, her daughter, Siobhan, and grandson Drew. Those relationships are central to who she is and we spent hours discussing them. Mare and Helen are so rude to each other and working with Jean Smart was amazing because her comic timing is incredible and we worked hard to inject a bit of levity in there. Those moments are important because without them it could easily have become a small-town crime drama, when it’s actually about community, grief, mercy and forgiveness.
WHAT WAS IT LIKE WORKING WITH GUY PEARCE AGAIN?
When we came back after lockdown I was living with Guy, Jean and Angourie Rice [who plays Siobhan] due to COVID restrictions. Guy was actually my childhood crush and I was absolutely obsessed with him in Neighbours, so living with him proves that dreams can come true! We actually share a birthday [5 October], which I’d known for years as I read it in a teen magazine during the 1980s, so it was nice to celebrate that together.
‘She is the kind of woman I admire more than any other’ KATE WINSLET