Kate Winslet in Mare of Easttown.Credit:HBO
Winslet says she knew she wanted to play the lead inMare of Easttown as soon as she read Brad Ingelsby’s script. “She’s a life force,but she’s also quietly dying inside. I’d never come across that juxtaposition of things before,and she just seemed so real.” She also took up the reins as executive producer,which meant she was involved in re-writes and casting;she was thus able to ask her old sparring partner Guy Pearce to play the man who comes closest to cracking Mare’s tough shell.
In the 2011 adaptation of the melodramaMildred Pierce,he played the louche rake who ignites Mildred’s dormant passions. He said at the time that he and his then-wife had a running joke that he was off to work to have more sex with Kate Winslet. In the new series he is courting Winslet once again,this time as a visiting creative writing teacher at the college at the leafy end of the town where Mare turns up corpses. “Richard Ryan comes into this woman’s life to offer her a slightly different perspective,” says Pearce. “She gets a sense that nobody else respects her the way he does,nobody else sees that she is worthy of love the way he does.”
They’re mates in real life,he says. They have to be:they share a birthday. “That connects you with someone on a level you can’t get away from. And she was a fan ofNeighbours when she was 11,so there’s that connection as well.”
Pearce was only 18;lonely Mike Young was his first role. “She likes to sing theNeighbours theme to me quite regularly. That does get old but you think,‘Well,if anyone is going to sing that at me,it’s fine that it’s you!’ We have a great rapport,and we all know what kind of outstanding actor she is,so any opportunity to work with her,I’m going to put my hand up.”
Winslet,left,and Guy Pearce go way back.Credit:HBO
Although there is a sense Ryan is always hovering in the background,Pearce says he was only on set for a week. Somehow,he seems to have missed Winslet’s emotional travails with Mare,possibly because they spent most of their time cooking – Winslet in charge,Pearce as the galley slave with a self-declared talent for kitchen organisation – when they weren’t talking about parenting young children.
“She’s all about family. You never have a conversation with Kate about the film industry. I have a little boy now[Monte,with girlfriend Carice van Houten],who is four and a half. Last time we worked,I didn’t have kids,so she was really excited to kind of get in my ear just about the intricacies of parenting. So that was wonderful,really,really wonderful.”