Mare of Easttown: Kate Winslet on quarantining with Guy Pearce
Kate Winslet had a crush on Guy Pearce from the age of 11. In Mare of Easttown, she lived out her youthful dream: kissing Mike from Neighbours.
When Kate Winslet was 11 years old she had one love, and one love alone: Mike Young from Neighbours.
And by Mike Young, she really means Guy Pearce, the Australian actor who played the sweet, but troubled teen on the soap opera for three years in the late 80s. “He was not one of my crushes, he was the only one I ever had,” Winslet says, reminiscing. “We have the same birthday, October 5, which I have known since I was 11, when I read it in the teen fanzine at my friend’s house.”
Winslet and Pearce have worked together twice: first in 2010 on Mildred Pierce, the Emmy award-winning HBO series, and secondly on the gritty mystery procedural, Mare of Easttown, premiering this month, Winslet’s triumphant return to the world of television. “When I first met Guy in 2010, when we did Mildred Pierce together, I walked into rehearsal room on the first day, dropped all my bags, and I said: ‘Before you say anything, please don’t speak. I have to come clean … I have been in love with you since I was 11. And I know that we share the same birthday, that we’re both Libra. And I’ve also known that since I was 11 as well.”
Winslet’s honesty served her well. “Of course we became great friends,” she recalls. So much so that she approached him to star as Richard, a writer who has relocated to the small town in Chester County, Pennsylvania where Winslet’s character, Mare — a respected, albeit hard-living detective tasked with solving the tragic murder of a young woman — was born, raised, is based, and will always be based, like everyone in her extended family, forever. In an early episode of the series, the pair meet at a bar and feel an instant connection — and an instant attraction. “I got more than I bargained for with my teen crush,” Winslet recalls. “We have a sort of love scene together — there’s a bit of kissing, and things like that, that was shot during COVID. So how do you protect those two actors? You get them to quarantine together. Yes!” she exclaims, fist pumping. “So I had to quarantine with my teen crush!”
The pair lived under one roof in upstate New York for 10 glorious days during filming, along with Australian Angourie Rice, who plays Winslet’s daughter, Siobhan, and Rice’s mother. “I would cook for everyone, and I’d literally be washing Guy’s underpants,” Winslet recalls, fondly. “This is really telling tales now, but he won’t mind me telling this,” she adds, conspiratorially. “So, he’s obsessive, in a great way, about recycling … Like, he will put the can of sardines in the dishwasher. He will wash that can, before it goes in the recycling. Admirable!”
Here, Winslet breaks out her Australian accent, as honed on Jane Campion’s Holy Smoke and Jocelyn Moorhouse’s The Dressmaker. “There would be days when he’d be like: ‘Darling, you can’t just put a chickpea can in the trash … Look, Kate, come on, we have to go through this.’ Suddenly, I’m going through the bins with Mike from Neighbours,” Winslet reveals. She grins. “Just gotta say: Wasn’t in the fantasy. I’m not happy about this situation at all … You’re ruining it, darl.”
Winslet is excellent company. The Oscar winner is currently living out the UK’s stage four lockdown on her property on England’s south coast with husband Ned Abel Smith, and children Mia, Joe and Bear. Bathed in early morning light in a sunny corner of her office, a bunch of flowers framed in the Zoom screen behind her, she is warm, friendly and chatty: mugging for the webcam, telling gossipy stories about that time she had to get down on the floor to help Pearce unstick the front door of their house — another devastating teen crush-vanquishing moment. She’s brimming with passion for Mare of Easttown, an atmospheric miniseries on which she also serves as an executive producer — her first time doing double duty behind the camera. Over seven episodes, the show is more than just your garden variety crime thriller. It’s a tale of family, trauma, grief and community. The cast, which also includes Jean Smart, Julianne Nicholson, Evan Peters and Sosie Bacon — as in, daughter of Kevin and Kyra — is impeccable. Production took place on location in and around the city of Philadelphia, in the same suburbs that inspired creator Brad Inglesby (The Way Back) to write this immersive series.
When we meet Winslet’s Mare, she is still processing deep trauma, the extent of which is not unveiled until a few episodes have unspooled. It was difficult, Winslet says, to dig into that darkness, both onscreen and off. “I did love playing her, I did,” Winslet says. “It was very, very hard, though. Because of all the trauma I had to create, and the grief I had to manifest and carry, that I had to keep simmering away in me. I always find it difficult talking about that side of acting, because it often can sound so indulgent. But I didn’t want to show up and just fake those things on day one.”
Instead, she delved deep into Mare’s backstory, and into her past grief, which had a surprising ripple effect behind the scenes. “I created this huge amount of trauma, which, weirdly, I have had a strange time letting go of, because I was playing it for such a long time … There were times when Mare has become an alter ego for me, and that’s never really happened to me before. That was quite weird and new, and I’m not sure my husband was entirely thrilled,” Winslet says, laughing. Reflecting back, she thinks she was “more immersed in playing Mare than I think I’ve ever been in any character I’ve ever played, really”.
In part, this was compounded by the drawn-out production on the series, which began in September 2019, shut down in March — with only five weeks of filming left to go — before recommencing in October 2020, finally wrapping for good in December. Even before production commenced, Winslet had spent five months preparing for the role. “Mare Sheehan has completely occupied my life since May 2019, literally until now,” Winslet muses. In some ways, it was nice to have a project that filled all those yawning days of COVID lockdowns. “In many ways, it almost got me through COVID. Having that character to kind of disappear into and preoccupy my mind with — Mare was my constant knitting pattern. I was constantly knitting her right the way through COVID last year.
“I think that’s part of the reason why this lockdown that we’ve just had in England now, that we’re actually still in, I have found very, very hard … Perhaps because I was not knitting Mare anymore.”
Winslet takes something from every film and television set home with her to that sunny barn on England’s south coast. She has curtains from her cottage in The Holiday, a sink from Mildred Pierce and a table from All The King’s Men — the one on which she kissed Jude Law quite a lot in the 2006 film. From Mare of Easttown, she took home the detective’s battered brown jacket. “Every now and then I’ll just put it on and …” Winslet sighs, slipping into her pitch-perfect Pennsylvanian accent to utter, “that’s better”, in Mare’s trademark Delco drawl.
The jacket was just one part of Winslet’s transformation from movie star into career police officer with a penchant for making bad choices. “I didn’t want her to look like the television version of a detective, with barrel-curled hair and makeup even when she’s falling asleep,” Winslet explains. “There is no makeup on my face, as you can see. She doesn’t care what she looks like. She never drinks water. She pretty much only drinks beer or coffee, mostly beer. I like that in a woman, may I just say,” she adds, laughing.
It’s been 10 years since Winslet first appeared on TV — alongside forever teen crush Pearce — in Mildred Pierce. Will we have to wait another 10 years for Winslet to return to the small screen?
“I hope not. I really hope not,” she enthuses. “I love doing television. In many ways, I almost prefer it to film. Because, quite selfishly, you get more time to tell your story. Mildred Pierce was a five-hour movie, really, and Mare is seven hours … With television you get to play all of it, which is wonderful.”
Mare of Easttown premieres April 19 on BINGE with weekly episodes.