which she is, in terms of the job that she does. I could never do the job that Mare does. I could never be a detective. I don’t think I have the mental stamina that is required. I have stamina, but in a different way.
I think the one thing I did feel I had in common with Mare was that real sense of family and how much it means to her to hold that together at all costs. And also to be able to admit to herself from time to time that she has failed in a lot of areas and tries desperately to correct those errors and to hold everyone as close to her as she can, even if she’s a difficult person to live with from time to time. It doesn’t change the fact that her love for her family is the thing that bolts her down and drives her in life and is her number one priority. And that was something that I was able to connect with in the midst of all these other things that were so far away and so far removed from myself.
I spent months learning how to be a detective, the real nuts and bolts, the detail of that job. I didn’t want to just be quickly shown on the day, so I really did spend several months working with the Easttown Police Department, as well as Marple Township Police Department and they were all amazing. I had a great woman named Christine Bleiler, who is a female sergeant detective, and she was just incredible and very, very supportive and was on set with us a lot.
14
What interested you in this project and why did you join? How long do you have? I was sent Episodes 1 and 2 initially and this is going really way back to the end of 2018. And I had a lot going on at the time. I was filming something, knew that I had something else coming up, so wrapping my head around how I would make this jump from the character I was playing at the time to being Mare Sheehan, it was like one of the biggest challenges I think I’ve ever been slapped with. And she’s nothing like me. So that’s pretty scary in a great way if you’re an actor like me who likes to feel terrified and exposed. And I just had never done anything like this, was excited to read something that just gripped me right away. I really felt the sense of not just who she was, but the world that she lives in, where she comes from, that sense of community, being so entrenched in a society that you sort of forget who you are from time to time. The sense of responsibility/burdens that Mare carries, for lots of reasons to do with her backstory, really intrigued me. But the story has such a heart to it and it’s rooted in so much truth, it just really resonated with me. I was excited to work with HBO again, having done ‘Mildred Pierce’ with them back in 2010. And I wanted to be part of an ensemble. There’s nothing more luxurious for an actor to spend time in the company of other wonderful actors. And I knew with the strength of the scripts that HBO would really cast up those supporting roles, which they did. So I was very excited by all of it. It sort of came at the perfect time in many ways for me where I was looking for something that was going to consume me as much as this would and it certainly did.
When you play a character that’s close to you, is that difficult or is it easier to play close to you? And how good would you be as a detective? I’d be a lousy detective. I’d be very good at the coffee and the after-beers, definitely. I’d be good at that, for sure. But this character, in many ways, she felt a million miles away from me,
In terms of your process, did you binge on any TV crime dramas and pull on any traits or personality traits or quirks from popular female TV detectives that we’ve seen in the past to kind of help you embody this character? I actually deliberately didn’t. I avoided that but it was a real dilemma for me. Not knowing this world at all, where can you find those things? TV shows. What I did do was watch a lot of real crime drama and YouTube footage. Particularly of the opioid district, Kensington, because I spent some time working with real police department individuals in blacked-out vehicles driving around those areas in order to learn. We really wanted to capture the essence of what it’s like to really be a detective from that town. It’s a place that really exists. The people there were just wonderful and so incredibly helpful with everything we had to do. And if anything ever felt fake or phony, we would say, ‘Please tell us right away.’ So Christine Bleiler would come up to me and say, ‘No, that’s what they do on TV. Don’t do that. No, that doesn’t work,’ and she would correct us and I would love it so much. She says, ‘Sometimes it can be messy. It can be a fumble. Things go wrong, allow for that. Don’t worry if it isn’t perfect all the time.’ I’d get so obsessed with putting the handcuffs on correctly. She was like, ‘Sometimes it’s messy. Sometimes one of them falls off and you’re like, ‘Oh, shoot, I’ve got to do that again on the way to the back of the car.’’ But so that was kind of how I worked through. It was just observing real people working with real people.
You’ve always been very good with American dialects and you’ve done it again here. Is that still as much a challenge for you as ever? Honestly, this one drove me crazy. There are really varying degrees of it. And the thing that was hardest for me, of course, was to do it well enough that you kind of shouldn’t hear the act of doing it. I always hate that when you can hear someone doing a voice or doing an accent. And that’s one of the things for me that is more important than anything is just making it just
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CE L EBRIT Y INTERVI EW KAT E WINS L E T
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