‘Mare of Easttown’: Kate Winslet Insisted She Not Have a ‘Trailer That’s Bigger Than Everyone Else’s’
Kate Winslet doesn’t want to be treated differently than any other actor on set. In her latest role, on HBO’s Mare of Easttown, the Oscar winner insisted she and her co-stars have the exact same trailers.
Kate Winslet’s the star of the HBO limited series
Winslet plays the title role on Mare of Easttown. Her character, Mare Sheehan, is a small-town detective in Easttown, Pennsylvania, investigating the murder of a young mother. She gets (unwanted) help from an outsider, Detective Colin Zabel (Evan Peters), which involves questioning those closest to her.
Mare of Easttown isn’t a thriller in Winslet’s opinion. Although there’s a murder to solve there’s a lot more going on. As she told TVLine in April 2021, she thinks of it as a “story about community, and family, and mercy, and hope”
From the outset of the show — no spoilers — it’s clear there’s a lot more at play. Sheehan’s dealing with family issues while simultaneously investigating a murder that’s shocked the community. Through it all Winslet’s Mare of Easttown accent disguises her own.
She’s also an executive producer on ‘Mare of Easttown’
Winslet not only plays the lead on Mare of Easttown but she’s also an executive producer. She told IndieWire in a May 2021 interview she took the last 10 – 15 years to “earn my stripes.”
“I’m not one to follow a trend,” Winslet said. “I just like to do my own thing. So there’s a reason that I didn’t get into producing earlier in my career. I’m an actor, and I love my job. I was always fine doing exactly that. It’s enough for me, anyway, to just be doing that,” she said.
As she got more involved with projects “from a very early stage” Winslet decided Mare of Easttown was the right one to try producing.
“With Mare, it just felt like the right time,” she added. Plus, I had learned so much about producing, and I thought, ‘Well, if ever I’m going to produce, I want to know what I’m doing.’ I don’t want to have the title in name only. I don’t want to do that. I think people maybe do that a bit, and that’s not my bag.”
In her role as executive producer, Winslet hid in the trunk during her co-star’s sex scene to offer support. In late March 2021, with just a few weeks until the Mare of Easttown premiere, she was talking to writer Brad Ingelsby making last-minute tweaks.
Kate Winslet said she’d ‘cry’ if she had a bigger trailer than her ‘Mare of Easttown’ co-stars
“I remember telling our producer Mark Roybal, about a week before we started, ‘Oh, just quickly, it’s very, very important to me that you know this,” she recounted to IndieWire. “I don’t know how the process works with booking trucks and equipment, but if I arrive on day one and I have a trailer that’s bigger than everyone else’s, no matter what it says on my contract, I will actually cry.”
What happened? The people behind Mare of Eastown listened.
“And then they changed everything! Because, sure enough, there was a trailer that I was supposed to have that was bigger,” Winslet said. “And then there were probably two or three other cast members [who were set up to] have the same as me, and I said, ‘No, we’re not doing any of that, none of that! Everyone is having the same!’”
Mare of Easttown airs Sunday nights on HBO and HBO Max.
