Entertainment
Kate Winslet admits Mare of Easttown accent is the one of the ‘hardest’ she’s ever done – but she’s nailed it
Kate Winslet has said the accent she uses in her new series Mare of Easttown is one of the ‘hardest’ she’s ever had to master.
The Hollywood icon plays a small-town Pennsylvania detective, Mare Sheehan, who is investigating the murder of a local girl in her close-knit community.
But the thing that required the most investigating by Winslet IRL was her character’s tricky southeastern Pennsylvania (Delco, to be precise) accent – think tricky vowels, ‘youse guys’ and, as Winslet herself says, ‘the way people from Delco kind of smush words together.’
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Winslet labelled Mare’s accent as ‘absolutely up there amongst the top two hardest dialects I’ve ever done’ – and this comes from an actor who’s done German (The Reader), Armenian-Polish (Steve Jobs) and many different types of US accents.
She added: ‘The thing about doing a dialect is making it just disappear. So it’s not like a voice that you hear the actor doing. It just evaporates. It’s something that I have to work on truly every day.’
But Susan Hegarty, Winslet’s dialect coach of 25 years – basically, since Titanic – is full of praise for the actor’s work ethic and natural abilities, telling the publication that ‘Kate is an accent nerd’ who ‘really takes pride in this’.
Hegarty continued: ‘A lot of actors cannot bear to be bothered with mechanics because they just want to act. But Kate has a mind like a steel trap.’
She praised the Oscar-winner on being able to ‘absorb information’ without it mucking up her concentration.
Work for Winslet on this accent included listening to tapes of locals, including a teacher and a real-life detective, as well as requesting a driver with a thick Delco accent.
She also covered her scripts and house in detailed notes on pronunciations, à la A Beautiful Mind, according to her director Craig Zobel.
Although Hegarty quotes Winslet as admitting publicly it’s the only accent she’s worked on ‘that made her throw things’, viewers have joined Hegarty in her praise of Winslet’s dialect chops on Twitter.
Unfortunately for fans of Mare of Easttown, they’ll just have to wait longer to binge on the full fruits of her labour as episodes are being released on a weekly schedule.
We know it’s tough, youse guys!
MORE : Mare of Easttown cast: Where have you seen them before?
