Kate Winslet on HBO’s ‘Mare of Easttown’ and that Delco accent: ‘I’m an actor who doesn’t like to get things wrong’

In the fall of 2019, Kate Winslet first showed up in Philly to learn the ways of Mare Sheehan, the suburban police detective she plays in Mare of Easttown, a seven-episode murder mystery premiering at 10 p.m. Sunday on HBO.

She drank the coffee (Wawa, naturally — black “with just a splash of milk”), she studied The Accent, she hung out with police officers, learning not only how to handle a gun but also how to talk about, say, obtaining evidence for a murder investigation in a way that maybe wouldn’t drive actual investigators crazy.

“I’m an actor who doesn’t like to get things wrong,” she said, laughing, when I asked her why achieving a Delco-worthy accent was so important to her.

Before we go any further: Yes, Easttown is in Chester County, not Delaware. Creator and executive producer Brad Ingelsby, who grew up in Berwyn, said he chose to place Mare there because “it sounded like such a generic town name.” But the town in the show is “sort of an amalgam,” he said. “It’s Coatesville, it’s Aston, it’s Drexel Hill.” Filming included locations in both counties as well as Philadelphia.

“I think it was a challenge she wanted to nail,” Ingelsby said of the accent, the nuances of which will probably be lost on viewers elsewhere.

Winslet would just as soon we not notice it too much, either.

“The really tricky part of doing a dialect is making it disappear. So the audience doesn’t hear you’re doing like a voice,” said the British-born Oscar winner, who worked with her longtime dialect coach, Susan Hegarty. “And of course with a Delco dialect, actually the temptation to make it sound like you’re doing a voice, it’s pretty high, You know,” she said, slipping into an exaggerated accent, “‘I was all on my own, I was alone, you want some wooder.’

“There were a lot of things I could have really leant into that would have made it sound like I was doing something a bit gimmicky and I didn’t want that to happen,” she said. “So I just had to drill it and drill it and drill it.”

Even then, there were tongue-twisters. “There was a line in a scene with Tony Delrasso [Eric T. Miller] that was literally like, ‘Walk out of here. Get in your car, on your own and go home, Tony.’ I was like, ‘Hang on, I think there might be one too many O’s in that. Can we just lose one of them?’ ” Winslet said, laughing.

A local dialect coach, Susanne Sulby, worked with other members of the cast, an ensemble that includes Jean Smart, Evan Peters, Julianne Nicholson, and Sosie Bacon. Sulby said she had recorded the voices of about 40 local people, matching them to the actors and their roles. One was Trish Lauria, a teacher.

“I had a ritual,” Winslet said. “I’d get in the car. I’d put my coffee in the cup holder. The AirPods would go in, and I would have Trish Lauria from Drexel Hill in my ear to and from set every day. That was the voice that kind of resonated with me the most. She was brilliant.”

When the two women eventually met, at Winslet’s request, “she greeted me in my own voice. It was incredible,” Lauria said, and asked about her family, whom Lauria had talked about in the recordings. “She was lovely.”

Winslet spent time with officers from several suburban departments, including Easttown’s — they were “a gang of great people I could just call on” — and singled out Christine Bleiler, a Chester County police detective who was one of the advisers on the show, as her “go-to person” for reality checks.

“I would honestly call her at 5 in the morning and I’d say, ‘Christine, I’m so sorry. Are you awake?’ ‘Well, I am now.’ I would say, ‘There’s a line I have today. It’s about cell-phone records in the case and I’m just not sure …’ And she’s like, ‘Oh, no, you wouldn’t say it like that. No, no, no, it’s messier, make it more like this.’

“My whole thing with Mare was being as real as possible. I didn’t want to do the TV version of a cop show, or a TV version of a cop,” Winslet said. “And [Bleiler] would say, ‘No, no, no, we see that on TV. That’s not real, never really happens like that, drives us … nuts. We see all these people, they’re so perfect the whole time. No, it’s not like that.’”

“Perfect” isn’t a word anyone but an actor would apply to Mare Sheehan. A divorced mother (and grandmother) who’s mourning the loss of her son to suicide, she’s struggling, not very politely, to keep what’s left of her family together, while the town that once hailed her as a hero threatens to turn against her over her failure to find a missing girl.

“Her determination to love and take care of the people in her life who mean the most to her came before everything else. And I loved that about her. That, to me, made this not just a small-town murder story,” Winslet said. “Mare was absolutely everything that any actor could ever want to play. She was lovable, but loathsome. She’s strong. She’s vulnerable. She’s prickly and harsh, she’s warm and compassionate. She’s morally sound, and she’s morally really corrupt. She’s tenacious, but she’s also very kind of weak at times, too … And at her very core, of course, she’s dealing with this personal crisis, this tragedy that really does inform every breath that she takes.”

Playing Mare’s grief required its own preparation, she said, including “working with a grief therapist, and also spending time with individuals who have lost either children or loved ones to suicide.”

The character was also an opportunity to counter what Winslet sees as “unrealistic or unattainable ideals” of what women should look like on-screen.

“I think that now as audiences we’re craving real stories about real people. And the closer to reality I was able to get in playing Mare, the more truthful it was and the more it meant to me,” she said. “It was very, very important that I was [wearing] no makeup. This is a woman who has not been to the hair salon since her son died. Hence 4 inches of very visible regrowth that you see.”

“Mare was a character I’d been thinking about for a long time, the sort of only detective in a small town,” said Ingelsby. The screenwriter (The Way Back, American Woman), a graduate of Archbishop Carroll and Villanova, had also been “wanting to tell a story about where I grew up and … about the people I grew up with.”

Landing Winslet helped make the project a reality. “Once you have Kate, everybody wants to be in business with Kate,” Ingelsby said. “It was hugely important creatively, but also huge just in terms of getting the show off the ground.”

Winslet read the first two episodes at the end of 2018, she said. “I hadn’t even filmed Ammonite at that point. … I knew right the way through filming Ammonite that I was going on to do this HBO show and play this character, Mare Sheehan. And so I started really preparing for the role in April, May of 2019. Went to Philly in September, started shooting in October of 2019, shut down [because of the pandemic] in March 2020. We still hadn’t finished, and then we’re back to work in September of last year, and I only just finished playing her in December. So put it this way: I was 43 when this whole process started and I had turned 45 by the time we wrapped.”

She’s not complaining.

“After all of these years,” she said, “I didn’t really know, I suppose, that it was going to be possible for me to experience any more maybe truly immersive experiences like perhaps I’d had on Mildred Pierce, or on The Reader, for example, or Revolutionary Road. And Mare just took it to a whole other level.”

Join us at 4:15 p.m. Thursday, April 22, for Inquirer LIVE, where Brad Ingelsby, the Berwyn native who created HBO’s Mare of Easttown, will talk with features reporter Ellen Gray about the locally filmed limited series, which stars Oscar winner Kate Winslet, and about how he turned his lifelong love of movies into a career. Registration is at inquirer.com/MareOfEasttown.