Kate Winslet is absolutely sure that she could never, ever be a detective.
“I’d be a f**king lousy detective,” she says definitively during a press event for her new series Mare of Easttown in which she plays, yes, a detective.
She says, “I’d be very good at the coffee and the after-beers, definitely. But I could never do the job that Mare does. I don’t think I have the mental stamina that is required. I have stamina, but in a different way.”
In the seven-part series, Winslet is Mare Sheehan, a detective living in the close-knit community she grew up in who becomes involved in a murder case that causes her to have to confront past expectations as her own life crumbles around her.
Winslet explained how the project came to her, saying, “It was the end of 2018. I had a lot going on at the time. Wrapping my head around how I would make this jump from the character I was playing at the time to being Mare Sheehan was one of the biggest challenges I think I’ve ever been slapped with. And she’s nothing like me, so that’s pretty scary in a great way if you’re an actor like me who likes to feel terrified and exposed.”
The project came to her at the perfect time, says Winslet, explaining, “I was looking for something that was going to consume me as much as this would, and it certainly did. I feel very lucky that it came along.”
While Winslet says she’s the polar opposite of the character she plays, she does believe that, “the one thing I did feel I had in common with Mare, that I quite honestly was able to lean on a lot, was that real sense of family and how much it means to her to hold that together at all costs. The fact that her love for her family is the thing that drives her and is her number one priority, was something that I was able to connect with in the midst of all these other things that were so far removed from myself.”
To prep for the role, Winslet says that even though she’s not really familiar with this world, she didn’t binge watch any female-fronted narrative crime series. “I actually deliberately didn’t. I avoided that. it was a real dilemma for me. But what I did do was I watched a lot of YouTube footage, particularly of the opioid district, Kensington.”
Aside from watching things on-screen, Winslet says that she spent several months with the Easttown and the Marple Township Police Departments, and found a supportive force in Christine Bleiler, a Chester County, PA, police detective.
“I spent some time working in blacked-out vehicles driving around in order to learn,” she says.
In the series, Winslet, who is British, takes on a very distinct American accent. She’s done this for other roles, but says this one was especially difficult for her.
“This one drove me mad because there are really varying degrees of it,” she says, adding, “The thing that was hardest for me was to do it well enough that you kind of shouldn’t hear the act of doing it. I always hate when you can hear someone doing a voice or doing an accent. One of the things for me that is more important than anything is just making it just disappear and blend in.”
Laughing a little, she says, “Finally, on the last day of the shoot, I was like, ‘Oh, I think I’ve nailed this now.’”
One might think that the Oscar winner, who has been a much sought-after actor for years, wouldn’t still be uncomfortable taking a role, but Winslet says she often feels otherwise. “I will say yes to something and then spend the entire time up to shooting it, telling myself, ‘I can’t play this part. Why did I say yes? Why did they even ask me? This was such a terrible idea.’ Actors are quite weird like that, and I’m definitely no exception.”
And, she adds, putting things off until they become inevitable is sort of her style of preparing for a role, saying, “I’m a very good procrastinator, so I can think and think and think and think for a long time. Then the pressure hits and it’s really happening and I know I have to knuckle under, and then I just can’t think about anything else.”
Winslet sites the work of others in her field as a motivating factor, saying, “We live in a world now where there are so many incredible actresses and it’s so exciting to see this. But, it does mean that we all have to contribute. We’ve all gotta stay in the game. You’ve gotta work hard. And I really feel that.”
She says that, “no matter how much experience I’ve had maintaining [a] high standard of work, ethics and integrity [are] really important to me because I think audiences can tell if you’re lazy or if you’re sort of skirting over the top of it, and I think audiences need to be respected fully because, if it weren’t for audiences, then none of us would have a job.”
This project really hammered this thought into her, says Winslet, explaining, “When it’s television, you’re going right into somebody’s home and entertaining, so I just try and work through the fear.”
‘Mare of Easttown’ airs Sundays at 10/9c on HBO.
