Mare of Easttown
Kate Winslet on the challenges of playing a grieving cop on the hunt for a murderer…
Kate Winslet stars as a grief-stricken, small-town Pennsylvania detective whose life is crumbling around her in Sky Atlantic’s powerful new US crime drama Mare of Easttown.
The Oscar-winner plays Mare Sheehan, who’s struggling to come to terms with the suicide of her son, Kevin (played by Cody Kostro), when she’s asked to investigate the grisly murder of a young mother, Erin Mcmenamin (Cailee Spaeny).
Haunted by a similar unsolved case from her past and fighting a custody battle over her grandson, Mare’s world starts to unravel while the line between her personal life and her police duties begins to blur.
We caught up with Kate, 45, to find out more about the sevenpart series...
What can you tell us about Mare?
Mare is 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 that she hasn’t dealt with, because the guilt she feels is so enormous. If she does confront it, it will consume her and she’ll crack. Also, Mare being a grandmother certainly added a dimension that I’ve never played before, but I’m all about playing as many things as possible!
How challenging did you find playing a character like this?
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 because of the coronavirus pandemic , 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 – 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.
Were you able to do any research for the role?
I worked alongside a grief therapist, to really understand what that process of loss is like, and 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 look him in the eye. I can’t even talk about it now.
My kids would be like,
‘Mum, it’s not real!’
It’s so stupid.
What’s Mare’s home life like?
She lives with her mother, Helen
[Jean Smart], her daughter, Siobhan
[Angourie Rice], and her grandson, Drew [Izzy
King . Those relationships are central to who Mare is and we spent hours discussing them. Mare and Helen are so rude to each other. 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.
Actor Guy Pearce (see interview, below), who starred with you in US Depression-era drama Mildred Pierce, plays Mare’s love interest, Richard Ryan.
Was it nice to be reunited? Yes, when we came back after lockdown I was living with Guy, Angourie and Jean, due to COVID restrictions. Guy was actually my childhood crush and I was absolutely obsessed with him in Neighbours Young[from 1986-1989],
he played heart-throb Mike so living with him proves that dreams can come true! But he takes his recycling very seriously and we’d often have to go through the bin sorting rubbish, which hadn’t been part of my childhood fantasy! 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.
I STILL HAVE HER BROWN COAT HANGING ON A HOOK IN MY
HOUSE