2 l April
18 - 24, 2021
Northeast Oregon TV Weekly
BY GEORGE DICKIE
Kate Winslet stars in
“Mare of Easttown,”
premiering Sunday
on HBO.
A detective struggles
with a murder and
her past in HBO’s
‘Mare of Easttown’
A detective investigates a murder that upends
life in her hometown, thus forcing her to
confront expectations from her past in a limited
drama series upcoming on HBO.
In “Mare of Easttown,” a seven-part series
premiering Sunday, April 18, Kate Winslet
(“Ammonite,” “Titanic”) is cast in the role of
Mare Sheehan, a 40-something police detective
who investigates when a child’s lifeless body is
pulled from a local creek, a troubling crime that
rocks her titular small Pennsylvania town.
It turns out the investigator herself is
troubled. The daughter of a detective, now
deceased, she has struggled with expectations
ever since she made the winning shot in a high-
school basketball championship game 25 years
earlier. She doesn’t get along with her mother,
Helen (Jean Smart, “Watchmen”), and spends
her idle hours at the bar, where she hooks up
with Richard (Guy Pearce, “Mildred Pierce”), a
local writing professor. But she has a confidante
in Lori (Julianne Nicholson, “August: Osage
County”), her protective best friend since
childhood.
The role was a challenging one for Winslet,
who was just coming off playing British
paleontologist Mary Anning in the 2020 feature
film “Ammonite,” and thus struggled to get into
this completely different character’s headspace.
“She’s nothing like me,” says Winslet, who
won an Oscar for “The Reader.” “So that’s
pretty scary in a great way if you’re an actor like
me who likes to feel terrified and exposed. And
I just had never done anything like this, (I) was
excited to read something that just gripped me
right away. I really felt the sense of not just who
she 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/burdens that Mare carries
– for lots of reasons to do with her backstory –
really, really intrigued me.”
For the part of Mare, Winslet did months
of prep work, spending time with police
departments in Easttown and Marple Township
outside of Philadelphia and working extensively
with series creator Brad Ingelsby, a native of
that area, to get the dialect and accent right.
But in the end, it was one universal theme that
enabled Winslet to connect with the character.
“That real sense of family and how much it
means to her to hold that together at all costs,”
the British actress says. “And also to be able
to admit to herself from time to time that she
has failed in a lot of areas and tries desperately
to correct those errors and to hold everyone as
close to her as she can, even if she’s a difficult
person to live with from time to time. 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 away and so far removed from myself.
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