hen Kate Winslet first read Brad Ingelsby’s script for Mare Of Easttown, she couldn’t put it down.

“Every page I turned, there was another gem,” she says. “There was another extraordinary new character or another glorious fake food that Mare ate and just didn’t give a shit about. For me, it was so much more than a genre-based small-town cop drama. Yes, there’s a murder but to me the real voices and the real spine of the piece are the people, the community of Easttown and it struck such a chord with me.”

Winslet is an exec producer on the series and also plays its eponymous character Mare, a beer-drinking, straight-talking, no-nonsense detective in an unglossy part of small-town America. Typically, this is the kind of role that is usually played by males, but Ingelsby carefully crafts a show so rooted in female characters, offering a refreshing change to the classic detective shows audiences have been so used to throughout the years.

Three generations of women live under one roof. Mare, a tough but fragile woman, lives with her daughter Siobhan (Angourie Rice) and mother Helen (Jean Smart). Their relationships are deeply complicated. Mare has a caustic relationship with her teenage daughter and a close but, at times comical and suffocating relationship with her mother. The three women are all trying to continually process the agonizing grief of losing Kevin (Cody Kostro) – Mare’s son, Helen’s grandson and Siobhan’s brother – a drug addict who had recently committed suicide. They are also taking care of Kevin’s four-year-old son, Drew, whose mother is currently in rehab. The boy is a stark reminder of their father but also a figure they are fiercely protective of as they attempt to digest their generational trauma.

These women are fully realized characters with intense and, often, conflicting emotions but despite their conflicts, they bind together in their grief, their love for each other and Drew. They are all enduring the weariness of a living in a working-class town with a murderer on the loose.

“I was interested in these three generations of women living under the same roof, which is something you see in these communities,” says Ingelsby, who grew up in Berwyn, Pennsylvania, a place similar to Easttown. It was there where he learned about that type of community.

“In the case of Mare, it’s particularly interesting because these three women have issues with each other,” he says. “They’re living under the same roof and these women really don’t want to talk about the feelings they have but they’re stuck together. That arrangement is ripe with conflict and fertile soil for all of these backstories to play out and for all the buried hurt and resentment to come to the surface.”

Mare’s mother, Helen, often offers moments of levity in the series, inducing some laugh-out-loud moments that provide a bit of air and lightness for the audience amid a storyline overlapping with sadness. At a funeral of a neighbor, the widower unexpectedly reveals that he had an affair with Helen, prompting a car journey home with Mare and Helen crying with laughter.

“Humor often goes with these kinds of relationships because they are so unfiltered around each other,” says Smart. “They just say everything. They don’t hold back…The darkness and lightness always go hand in hand and when you see what suicide does to families and what drug addiction does to families, there’s always a dark comedy lurking under all of that otherwise you’d go mad.”

Siobhan, who is a mere teenager herself, has been thrust into the position of becoming an adult too soon and this, says Rice, was something that she “didn’t take lightly” when it came to playing her as a character.

“Siobhan has been through so much in her life that I wanted to bring elements of truth to that because it’s so important to give it the time and dedication it deserves,” says Rice. “She’s been thrust into this adult world with these adult responsibilities and what I really love about her story is that she is learning how to be a teenager. She’s falling in love for the first time. Through all of this darkness she’s finding time to be a bit selfish and think about what she wants.”

Outside of the Sheehan household, Mare’s best friend Lori (Julianne Nicholson) proves to be a solid anchor and one of the few people the detective finds herself at ease with. However, Lori is holding her own secrets amidst the backdrop of dealing with a cheating husband.

“Lori is a wife and mother first so she’s able to put other people ahead of her,” says Nicholson. “But it was exciting to me to know that she had secrets and she gets to reveal them because in life people tend to try to not show their secrets.”

For Winslet, it was a delicate balance to play a woman overwhelmingly oozing with grief for her son while also being a tough, beer-drinking detective determined to solve a murder case within her small community.

“It was almost like [Mare] became an alter ego for me,” says Winslet. “I truly had to create her and believe every strand of her world. There were elements of it that were really, really hard and I genuinely found it hard letting go and coming out the other side. Our shared creation of the grief for Kevin for me became so real.”

Winslet adds: “If Mare was drinking and behaving in less than amicable or respectful ways, then that’s just what she was doing. She could be impossible and yet entirely lovable all in the same breath and I just had to commit to all of it. I had to commit to her looking like shit. I had to commit to knowing that audiences might find her infuriating at time. I had to absolutely accept that vanity was going to go right out of the window, which I love. I love nothing more than playing a character like that one.” 

I had to absolutely accept that vanity was going to go right out of the window, which I love.