The internet is already obsessed with Kate Winslet's highly anticipated new HBO crime drama

Kate Winslet has done it again

Kate Winslet HBO Mare of Easttown
(Image credit: Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBO)

We've got a mystery on our hands, and the glamourous Kate Winslet is here to solve it. For the first time in 10 years, Kate will be gracing our television screens again, but this time as a Mare Sheehan, a police sergeant from the fictional town Easttown, Pennsylvania.

While juggling the roles of mom, grandma, and detective, she's also battling with the grief of a son she lost to suicide and an obsession with cases involving missing and murdered girls. It's clear that this role won't be one filled with laughs and heartfelt moments. Instead, we'll be met with a story that Kate told Sky News is one of her "most challenging" ones yet.

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"I started preparing probably about five months before we were shooting and we started shooting in September of 2019 - I was 43 - and by the time we ended up wrapping in December, I turned 45, so I held this character inside of myself for all of that time," she told the outlet.

"At the centre of that is this real gut-wrenching grief and crisis, personal crisis, that she is in, and creating that level of trauma and sustaining it was really extremely hard," she added.

Kate Winslet Mare of Easttown

(Image credit: Photograph by Sarah Shatz/HBO)

Channeling her character's trauma also added some mental weight to herself, which has made it difficult for her to separate the character from herself.

"And actually I found it quite hard unraveling myself from that...after all these years of doing this job, you would think by now that I would have some decent systems in place to cope with those kinds of emotional separations from a character back into my own life, but I have to say on this one, I just haven't really been able to," Kate explained.

As Kate takes on this challenging role, she also adds another skill to her resume: executive producer. Using her industry knowledge, the Titanic star decided to take a shot and try out producing too for this new role.

"Producing is a really different job to acting, and there's a reason why I've never done it before," she said. "It's because I wouldn't have known how to, but after all of these years, you know, I have paid attention, and I have learnt, and it did feel like, yeah, I think I would know how to do this a bit now."

She's not the only one in her family who has jumped back into acting either. Kate's daughter, Mia, has also decided to pursue an acting career but wanted to do it without anyone knowing who her famous mother is. Using one clever trick, her daughter was actually able to "fly under the radar" in Hollywood and score her first lead role in the 2020 thriller Shadows.

Rylee Johnston

Rylee is a U.S. news writer who previously worked for woman&home and My Imperfect Life covering lifestyle, celebrity, and fashion news. Before joining woman&home and My Imperfect Life, Rylee studied journalism at Hofstra University where she explored her interests in world politics and magazine writing. From there, she dabbled in freelance writing covering fashion and beauty e-commerce for outlets such as the TODAY show, American Spa Magazine, First for Women, and Woman’s World.