EXCLUSIVE: Kate Winslet has told Deadline that there’s a “strong likelihood” of a second season of acclaimed HBO murder mystery Mare of Easttown going before cameras in 2027.
Ever since the seven-part drama, created by Brad Ingelsby, about Mare Sheehan, a small town sergeant detective in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, investigating missing and murdered young women, gripped audiences in 2021, there have been on-and-off conversations between the show’s top creatives – writer Ingelsby, director Craig Zobel, Winslet and HBO chieftains – about the possibility of bringing back the dogged detective, who loves to vape and chug down Rolling Rock.
Playing a cop who resides in the same house with four generations of her family, and the traumas that haunt them, plus the gruesome crimes her character delved into, left Winslet “beat,” but “grateful” she got to play her.
(L-R) Kate Winslet, Evan Peters and Justin Hurtt-Dunkley. (HBO)
HBO
Winslet notes that initially Mare of Easttown was designed as a one-off single-season drama. “It was done and dusted, finished,” says the Titanic, Mildred Pierce, and Avatar star.
However, several months ago, while Winslet was in London editing Goodbye June, her directorial debut now streaming on Netflix, the topic of more Mare of Easttown came up, “and there was some conversations,” she recalls.
“They were proper conversations around a timeframe when it could be possible. And so I think we probably will do it, and that’s the first time I’ve felt that,” Winslet declares.
Asked when the new shows would be filmed, Winslet stressed that it “wouldn’t actually be this year, I reckon it would end up being 2027 to film it. There’s a strong likelihood it would film sometime in 2027.”
Winslet shut down any further discussion about Mare of Easttown 2 and I was not able to draw from her details pertaining to plot. However, during a chat we had a few years back, during awards season for Ammonite, her excellent film with director Francis Lee, we got to talking about Mare Sheehan, and I idly wondered whether there would be a second season.
The Oscar winner stated then that it was “done, dusted, finished,” but the only way to get her back to the Philly suburbs to play Mare again would be if “the story was too bloody good to resist, because it took a lot out of all of us filming Mare. We were filming during Covid. Brad’s the same. We’ll only do it again if the story’s compelling enough.”
So, it would appear that the “bloody good” target she cited has been reached.
The new storyline must be bloody good to entice them all back. I just rewatched Mare of Easttown, and it’s a masterwork about motherhood, family, community and murder. Zobel’s direction and the way Ingelsby’s story wove in the lives of so many of Mare’s nearest and dearest, exploring the most heartbreakingly chilling and intimate details of their lives, enthralled me.
And, without question, the acting is in a class all by its beautiful self. Winslet won an Emmy award for best lead actress in a limited series; and co-stars Julianne Nicholson, as Mare’s best friend Lori Ross, and Evan Peters, as Detective Colin Zabel, won Emmy silverware for their supporting roles.
Julianne Nicholson (Photograph by Michele K. Short/HBO)
Other key parts were played by Jean Smart, as Helen, Mare’s sassy mother, Angourie Rice as daughter Siobhan, and an ensemble that looked as if they were born and bred in Delco. In fact, scores of locals from the main locations played townsfolk.
Task, Ingelsby’s latest prestige series for HBO starring Mark Ruffalo, as a quietly assured FBI agent, is set in and around the same fictional geographical Philly universe as Mare of Easttown.
There has been a lot of chatter suggesting that, at some point, the two shows might somehow merge. Ruffalo himself, when we bumped into each other a while back at a BAFTA Tea Party in Beverly Hills, offered me this view: “At some point those two [shows] might run into each other in the future, that’s what they’re saying. It’s not set, nothing’s set.”
Meantime, Winslet is slowly coming down from the whirlwind of promotion she gamely plied for Goodbye June, based on a screenplay by Joe Anders, her son with former husband Sam Mendes.
The movie stars Helen Mirren, Timothy Spall, Johnny Flynn, Andrea Riseborough, Toni Collette, Winslet, and the great, one and only, Fisayo Akinade. Might one or two of them be free to join Winslet in 2027 to dive into a few bars in Delco?