Mare of Easttown would have been just another whodunnit without the rich detail of an older woman’s story
Kate Winslet has always had guts. But for her to have a belly, let alone one that wobbles and jiggles in the way most 45-year-old women’s middles quite unremarkably do, is still apparently a thing so shocking as to make headline news. This week the star of the cult TV drama Mare of Easttown disclosed that she had refused her director’s offer to edit out footage of her “bulgy bit of belly” from a sex scene, arguing that her character should be allowed to look like the woman she was meant to be: a middle-aged small town detective who has carried two children, unwinds after an exhausting day with a beer rather than a gym session, and has rather more serious things to worry about than the odd flabby bit hanging over her jeans.
“She’s a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from. I think we’re starved of that a bit,” as Winslet, who not only starred in but executive produced the show, puts it. Not since the eponymous heroine of Shirley Valentine ran away to Greece in search of one last adventure, and marvelled at her new lover’s willingness to kiss her stretchmarks, has a naked stomach on film been deemed to make such a statement.
