In “The Regime,” Winslet gets to have a little fun
LONDON>> Chancellor Elena Vernham would like you to know she is “very much not ridiculous.” She would never serve salmon at an official event. (That would be “meek.”)
The fictional character, portrayed by Kate Winslet in the darkly funny new HBO limited series “The Regime,” is a neurotic autocrat losing her grip on her country. A title card early on in the series, which premiered Sunday, announces that we are somewhere in “Central Europe,” in a country whose official vegetable is the sugar beet. As a U.S. senator played by Martha Plimpton puts it during an official visit: “A strong woman leader providing for her people, resisting China? We love all that.”
Elena’s people, however, are suffering mass unemployment, and many are starving. So it’s maybe a little tone-deaf when she broadcasts a message to the country at Christmas, and it’s a video of her singing “Santa Baby,” in a furtrimmed miniskirt and boots.
“I wanted to do something that felt absurd,” Winslet said in a video interview from her home in Sussex, England. Elena is a hypochondriac and an agoraphobe, and Winslet said that, from a political standpoint, her character “absolutely has moments of just making stuff up.”
She is “fearless,” Winslet said, “and yet terrified of the world.”
“The Regime” was created by Will Tracy, whose previous writing credits include “Succession,” and the fine-dining satire “The Menu,” two projects that also feature delusional figures, drunk on their own power. Tracy said that he enjoys creating tyrannical characters “because they have created a situation where they cannot be argued with or reasoned with.”
He had been obsessed with reading about geopolitics and authoritarian regimes since his late teens, he said. For “The Regime,” he researched leaders from Syria, Russia and Romania, and found that they shared “a shaky relationship with reality” and “a desperate need for survival.”
In an interview, he was reluctant to name the reallife figures that inspired Elena’s character, because he did not want the show to be understood as a pastiche. Still, eagle-eyed viewers might notice that the chancellor shares a name (as well as an early career in the sciences) with Elena Ceausescu, the wife of Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu.
Or that Elena’s palace is a quarantined bubble, as was the residence of Russian President Vladimir Putin during the early days of the pandemic.
There was also comic potential, Tracy said, in the idea that smaller European countries — like Elena’s — that are not members of NATO or the European Union might be “consigned to the kids’ table of geopolitics.” If you’re “a certain kind of paranoid and insecure authoritarian leader, that could quite quickly give you a bit of a complex,” he said.
But Winslet was adamant that “The Regime” is “not a documentary, it is not a re-creation of historical events.”
“This is not a current affairs show,” she added.
Tracy said it felt more responsible — and more fun — to create his own world rather than taking on the baggage of a real country’s history. The palace scenes were shot at Schönbrunn Palace, in Vienna, to create the sense of a country “living in the ruins of their former cultural prestige,” he said.
Elena’s land is rich in cobalt, which interests the United States. The chancellor is “pretty much a tyrant and a monster at the beginning of the show, but America seems quite willing to do business with her,” Tracy said.
Yet she has enough selfawareness to also know how she is seen by the West, jokily referring to herself as “a tacky blonde from a tacky country.” Consolata Boyle, the show’s costume designer, said she worked with Winslet to create a look that veered toward “the tawdry, or the vulgar,” which meant dresses in synthetic fabrics and with figure-hugging silhouettes.
Her immaculately coiffured hair and clinging bodycon dresses, however, are all part of an elaborate performance. She speaks with a set jaw and a barely-detectable, littlegirl lisp, and Winslet said she wanted her character’s speech impediment, like her vulnerability, to be “something she’s trying very, very hard to hide all the time, and throughout her life it has haunted her.”
The lisp comes out most when she goes to visit, and talk to, the corpse of her father. He was also a politician, albeit one who died before he gained power, and his preserved body lies in the palace mausoleum. Just as Elena seeks validation from the West, she also still craves her dead father’s approval.
But the show really centers on Elena’s relationship with another man, Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts). A handsome soldier nicknamed “The Butcher,” he is hired to wave a device that measures air moisture in front of the hypochondriac chancellor wherever she goes, because she’s terrified that the palace is infested with mold. But over the show’s six episodes, Elena and Herbert become close.
Schoenaerts said that Hubert and Elena were “two people that should have never met,” who become obsessed with one another. As Elena struggles to maintain her power when public opinion turns, the pair “find something in each other that keeps them alive for a little longer,” Schoenarts said.
At the heart of the show, said Winslet, was a woman fighting for her small country, and, at times, not having a clue what she’s doing. That appealed to her own sense of humor, the actress said, adding that she was drawn to “anything that is just a bit arch, and involves people sending themselves up.” (She was “a huge sucker for Will Ferrell and ‘Blades of Glory,’” she added.)
Playing Elena had been “a heck of a lot of fun,” she said, grinning. “I have to let the audience know, this is something they are allowed to laugh at.”