New Kate Winslet HBO show starts filming in Pa. suburbs

From Concrete Cowboys and Queer Eye to Dispatches from Elsewhere, the Philadelphia area has been home to quite a few major Hollywood productions in the past few months.

We can add one more to the list.

Kate Winslet-fronted HBO series Mare of Easttown will film in the Philadelphia suburbs through April 2020. Locations, Heery-Loftus Casting has indicated on Facebook, include spots throughout Delaware County, as well as Coatesville and Downingtown in Chester County.

Winslet reportedly arrived in the area earlier this month to start filming, paparazzo HughE Dillon reports.

Set for release sometime in 2020, Mare of Easttown stars Winslet as a “small-town Pennsylvania detective” investigating a murder while “trying to keep her life from falling apart,” according to a show description on IMDB. Deadline reports the series will also feature appearances by Broadway’s John Douglas Thompson, who will portray Chief Carter of the Easttown Police Department, and Sosie Bacon, daughter of actor (and Philly native) Kevin Bacon.

Beyond its apparent setting in Easttown Township, Chester County, Mare of Easttown has other local connections. The series was created by Berwyn’s Brad Ingelsby, who is a Villanova University graduate and son of former Villanova basketball star Tom Ingelsby, according to a 2015 Inquirer report. Director Gavin O’Connor is a University of Pennsylvania graduate.

Production of Mare of Easttown is scheduled to get into full swing as the production of Dispatches from Elsewhere is winding down. That AMC series is scheduled to wrap filming in town in November. (Greater Philadelphia Film Office executive director Sharon Pinkenson confirmed that Dispatches was filming on Monday morning in the Italian Market.)

Besides Dispatches, Queer Eye, and Concrete Cowboys, Philly also served as a production location for an episode of NBC’s This Is Us, which brought cast members like Sterling K. Brown and Lyric Ross to town last month. We’re also slated to get a visit from The Irishman star Robert DeNiro, who will film the crime drama After Exile here in town.

As Pinkenson put it last month, for filmmaking in Philly, it’s “been quite a year.”