How “Mare of Easttown” is a Whole Mood

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Both a character study and mystery, HBO’s Mare of Easttown follows a small-town detective, played by Kate Winslet, who’s haunted by an unsolved case.

The English Oscar and Emmy-winning actor seems a dead ringer for another Emmy nomination for her role, but the drama, which is both character study and mystery story, is getting kudos across the board.

The series was also a hit with viewers. “The final episode of Mare of Easttown limited series drew four million viewers over the holiday weekend across HBO and HBO Max, with nearly three million viewers Sunday night (all platforms), marking a series high for both linear and digital, according to HBO,” Deadline notes. “The finale also set the record as the most watched episode of an Original Series on HBO Max during its first 24 hours of availability, besting the finales of recent hits The Undoing and The Flight Attendant over the same period of time.”

READ MORE: ‘Mare Of Easttown’ Finale Hits Series Highs, Most-Watched Episode Ever On HBO Max (Deadline)

Mare of Easttown is created and written by Brad Ingelsby (Our Friend, The Way Back), who told Deadline’s Diana Lodderhose that growing up with a lot of women, including his two sisters and mother and aunts — and a stutter — meant that he spent a lot of time listening to their conversations.

“Listening to how these women talk and the relationships and the way they took care of each other and supported each other, it was something that I got to witness a lot as a kid so I think I wanted to do justice to the relationships that I grew up with,” Inglesby said.

READ MORE: ‘Mare Of Easttown’ Stars, Director & Key Crew On Why The HBO Limited Series Is So Much More Than A Small-Town Cop Drama (Deadline)

All seven episodes are executive produced and directed by Craig Zobel, who approached the limited series as if it were one big feature film.

This included preserving a continuity of story by directing all episodes himself and employing one editor (Amy E. Duddleston) and one cinematographer, Ben Richardson, ASC (Beasts of the Southern Wild).

“That’s not normal for a TV show — even with one director you sometimes have two or three editors,” noted Zobel, whose directing career spans features (Compliance, Z For Zachariah) and television (Westworld, American Gods, The Leftovers), in an interview with Robert Goldrich for Shoot.

“On one hand, a single creative artisan in each key discipline infused the project with a feature filmmaking feel,” Goldrich explains. “At the same time Mare of Easttown was not confined to a couple of hours on the big screen but rather had the luxury of some seven hours for character development and to create a portrait of a small town.”

The look of the show, which is set it in blue-collar, semi-rural Philadelphia, “needed to be naturalistic, all about the acting,” Zobel said. “We weren’t trying to make a show with an aggressive visual style that would impact the naturalism of the acting. The style of the show grew out of the two of us [with Richardson] interacting with each other.”

READ MORE: Director/EP Craig Zobel Reflects On HBO’s “Mare of Easttown” (Shoot)

Zobel discussed the series’ tangled storylines in an interview with Below The Line’s Daniel Eagan, including an early scene in a gas station convenience store with four different storylines converging. “That was a fun one to do,” Zobel commented:

“I’m quite proud of some of the shots in that, just in terms of being able to hand off between characters. There is a way to play that scene where Mare is pretty scared of Tony [Delrasso, played by Eric T. Miller]. We shot it where she feels uncomfortable and threatened because Tony is sort of looming. We had shots through the freezer door of her watching him coming in, and some of that still exists in the final cut. I was committed to that idea until the edit room. As I watched the episode, I felt, no, Tony isn’t a threat. The most important part of the scene is Mare and Dawn [Enid Graham]. That was one of those times where I was super glad that after doing the take where Kate was incredibly bothered by Tony, we did one where she wasn’t. And that’s the one we used.”

READ MORE: Mare of Easttown Director Craig Zobel Talks About Making the Haunting HBO Thriller (Below The Line)

Richardson’s other major TV experience on TV was the first season of Yellowstone. Of Mare he says, in a separate interview with Eagan, “I loved the idea of being able to sculpt the entire arc of the show… In a show like Mare, audiences are tracking both the information being given them in scenes, and the richness of the underlying character arcs.”

He worried about the scope and scale of the story. “There were so many scenes that took place in these domestic environments and a lot of simple dialog scenes in small spaces,” he said during a “Gold Derby Meet the Experts: Cinematographers“ panel discussion.

“What I found was that we could bring all the scope we needed without cheating in any way. We were shooting in the real locations and we could make it all about the nuance and the detail and the scope of these homes, these environs, these little spaces in which these grand events were taking place.”

READ MORE: Mare of Easttown Cinematographer Ben Richardson on the Moment He Realized the Power of Kate Winslet’s Performance (Gold Derby)

Richardson’s camera package was pretty simple: ARRI Alexa Mini and Leitz Summilux-C lenses with no filtration. Anything flashier would have made the aesthetic artificial.

“Some of our real-world locations were lit with old fluorescents in the ceiling that maybe hadn’t been changed in 15 years, or with simple, store-bought practical lamps that people just kind of filled their homes with,” he explains to Below The Line.

“We did what was necessary to manage such fixtures for technical reasons, but tried to stay true to the feel, and also to emulate it on our stage builds.”

READ MORE: Contender Profile: Mare of Easttown Cinematographer Ben Richardson, ASC (Below The Line)

The 100-day shoot was interrupted by COVID shut down on March 13, and returned to production in mid-September.

“There’s no version of making a movie or TV show where anybody should find out that their mother-in-law passed away because they worked on this show,” Zobel tells Zak Wojnar at Screenrant. “I was just terrified whenever the producer came up to me [that] she was going to tell me we had to shut down. We were very cautious, I think because we came back so early. I think we had 10,000 tests over the course of the shoot, and we were able to make everybody feel safe, but it was intense.”

That said, half the script had to be reworked in some way to fit the restrictions. These included scenes with the same background actors costumed differently, to avoid having more people than necessary on set. Likewise, “a big rock concert in the story at one point that had to go,” Zobel explained. They also switched to exclusively using remote heads during COVID so that fewer people were needed on set.

READ MORE: Craig Zobel Interview: Mare of Easttown (Screenrant)

Creator Ingelsby says the sense of place was informed by his own background growing up in and around Chester County and Delaware County

“I wanted to portray these communities in a way that was honest — this is how close these people are,” he told Rick Porter at The Hollywood Reporter. “They’ve grown up here, they raised their kids here, and they’ve stayed here. It does feel like a million miles away, even though it’s like a half hour outside the city. I was trying to create a sense of place that felt almost like a bubble, because the claustrophobia of it all helps in terms of the case and the rising tension.”

READ MORE: Mare of Easttown Creator on the Final Twist: “It’s a Tragedy” (The Hollywood Reporter)

You know a show has hit the zeitgeist when it gets parodied on Saturday Night Live. The sketch comedy translated the title to “Murdur Durdur” and featured host Elon Musk as a shady priest.

“I loved the sketch on SNL. They nailed our vibe,” Richardson says to BTL. “I was very flattered by that. But we also did seek out these pops of color and levity, particularly in the scenes with Mare and her mom. There were other beats where we tried to find opportunities to lift the lighting, make it a little bit more high key. You don’t want to grind an audience down. You want to give people an opportunity to breathe, give them the sense that life isn’t all dark and gray.”

In the video below, watch a conversation moderated by Los Angeles Times entertainment writer Meredith Blake with the creative team behind Mare of Easttown: executive producer and lead actress Kate Winslet, creator, executive producer and writer Brad Ingelsby, executive producer Mark Roybal, and executive producer and series director Craig Zobel:

Want more? Watch “The Making of Mare of Easttown” featurette with the cast and crew in the player below: