The star of one of 2021’s biggest TV hits, Mare of Easttown, talks about weepy reunions with Leonardo DiCaprio, binging Ted Lasso and middle-aged women taking over our screens
Kate Winslet will be ready in a sec. “I’m just going to put some more eyedrops on my stye,” she says. Blame her intense crime drama Mare of Easttown, one of the TV hits of the pandemic. “It was quite a stressful job, and about nine weeks in I got three styes in my left eye, the third of which turned into a solid little marble and had to be cut out. But I pushed on. On with the show!” In it, she plays DS Mare Sheehan, who is raising her grandson, coping with her son’s suicide, and trying to solve the murder of a young mother in a working-class Philadelphia suburb. All without makeup: Mare is more likely to reach for a Cheeto topped with a squirt of spray cheese than anything in the Max Factor range.
“The discussion about how Mare looked blew my mind,” says Winslet. The 46-year-old actor is speaking by phone from the West Sussex home she shares with her husband, Ned Abel Smith, and their seven-year-old son Bear, as well as her two children from previous marriages: 21-year-old Mia by her first husband, Jim Threapleton, and 17-year-old Joe by her second, the director Sam Mendes. “People were asking, ‘Did she gain weight? Didn’t she look frumpy? Wasn’t that brave of her?’ But why should that be brave? I suppose because it’s not how leading actresses are represented. Maybe Mare will be the tipping point, and we’re going to stop scrutinising women on screen quite so much.”
