PAGE 2 • TV
THE BULLETIN • APRIL 15 - 21, 2021
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.
Guide to the TV grids
TV Ratings:
‘G’: General audience
‘Y’: Young children
‘7’: Children over 7
‘14’: Children over 14
‘PG’: Parental guidance
‘M’: Mature audience only
PA: Parental advisory
DVS: Descriptive video service
EI: Educational/instructional
D: Dialogue
L: Language
S: Sexual situations
V: Violence
Common symbols :
HD scheduling, please
note:
’:I n stereo
Å: Closed captioning
iTV: Interactive TV program
N: Program is new
Schedules are based on standard-
definition (SD) channels. High-
definition (HD) channels may vary
by three hours when a West Coast
programming feed is not available to
your TV provider. Please refer to your
provider’s interactive TV guide for
detailed HD channel schedules.
For a list of cable and over-the-air
channels by zip code, as well
up-to-the-minute TV programming,
please visit www.bendbulletin.
com/tv. For questions or feedback
please call The Bulletin Circulation
Department at 541-385-5800.