Kate Winslet has fun playing tyrant in ‘The Regime’
MANILA, Philippines — After “Mildred Pierce” and most recently, “Mare of Easttown,”
Kate Winslet has returned to HBO for the third time as a “dictator gone wild” in the geopolitical satire “The Regime.”
Kate is Chancellor Elena Vernham, an increasingly unstable and paranoid head of a European authoritarian nation, who gets governance advice from a disgraced and equally unwell soldier, Herbert Zubak, played by Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts.
As a hypochondriac, Elena initially enlisted Zubak — nicknamed “The Butcher” for supposed involvement in the massacre of unarmed protesters — to serve as her “personal water diviner.” His chief job is to monitor moisture levels of rooms that Elena enters. They fall in love — in a toxic kind of way.
Adding to the absurdist nature of the series, Elena as a leader makes regular visits to the mausoleum for “talks” with her dead father, and sends Christmas greetings to the nation with singing and skimpy costumes, while blissfully surrounded by yes-men pretending everything is fine in the citizenry.
But any resemblance of Elena to real-life political figures, dead or alive, past or present, appears to be purely coincidental, not intentional. She’s a work of “complete invention,” as what the Oscar-winning English actress stressed herself when pressed if she ever drew bits of inspiration from actual personalities.
“Luckily for us, the show is in an imagined country and the character is a complete invention,” she told the media, including STAR, during a virtual roundtable interview.
“It was actually very important that I didn’t go down the road of drawing comparisons from other political figures or characters from history that I may have been thinking about,” she further said.
“I just didn’t. I just knew this is a unique character. She’s nothing like anything I’ve ever come across in my life before. I have to somehow transform myself and become this disgusting, sort of wild, tyrannical but vulnerable, interesting, multi- textured, complicated woman. I kind of dug into that.”
Kate continued to explain that she also didn’t want Elena to be this “perfect shouting dictator,” otherwise the show would be “monotonous and boring” to watch.
“I wanted to really create somebody who had a history from her own life, her own childhood, things that had stayed with her, that had affected her and really traumatized her. And that plays out in her physical self and her emotional self, and how she speaks and moves and interacts with other people.”
To help shape her character as this “psychological mess of a woman,” meticulous attention was given to her wardrobe, which made her “look obviously sexual” because “this is the woman who’s trying to exert her power all the time, and never really getting it right,” according to Kate.
“Wanting to feel good about herself and somehow making the mistake of thinking that the way you feel good about yourself is by dressing in kind of ridiculously tight pencil skirts and lacquering her hair up a little bit higher at the front or darkening the lipstick just a little bit more,” she added.
Kate also worked with a neuroscientist and a psychologist to understand speech patterns and how trauma in someone’s youth can impact speech.
“And Elena, it’s no secret, has a tyrannical, dead father who she still has conversations with. I wanted to build the scars of what had happened to her being raised by this tyrannical man. I wanted to build that into her physical body and how she speaks. And I also wanted it to be something that she has had to learn to live with and adapt with.”
“The Regime” also stars Guillaume Gallienne, Andrea Riseborough, Martha Plimpton and Hugh Grant.
Below are more excerpts from the 20-minute interview with Kate.
On “The Regime” as a straight-up satire:
“I think it’s, you know, a geopolitical satire. People are going to take from it what they choose to take from it. But the show is pretty agnostic in terms of real-life circumstances. I think it’s really important to remember that it is a comedy.
“It is not real. It’s set in an imagined country in the middle of Europe. It isn’t a retelling of historical events and it certainly isn’t a docudrama. For me, it was important that I lent into the delusional side of Elena Vernham as much as I could, whilst also building a real character, a real woman… It’s a country. Look, it’s led by a woman. It’s not a man. Those things were good.
“But yeah, I always saw it as a really dark comedy, and I just felt so lucky to be part of something really that involved so many actors. I was just saying to a journalist earlier that actually one of the things for me was the fact that I was going to get to play a comedic role for the first time since an episode of ‘Extras’ 20 years ago.
“But also to be in a sort of a pack of actors like that. Coming back from COVID, I really needed that. Like I just didn’t want to be doing something by myself but to share that space and be able to kind of all come up with these creative decisions together. And because, you know, it’s meant to be absurd, it meant that we could really, really have fun with that.”
On creating this portrait of a woman in a powerful setting:
“I did love the fact that the creator, Will Tracy, chose to have this country be led by a woman and not a man. I thought that was very, very cool. But it also meant that my job was in many ways so much harder because I had to lean into the absurdity of her and how delusional and paranoid she is. But I did have to kind of give her a heart and a soul without also trying to make the audience love her. That would not have been right.
“I had to kind of walk the line between the comedy and tragedy of Elena Vernham. We all were. We all kind of did it together, you know. We were very much an ensemble cast of people trying to hit the same rhythm and trying to fill these characters in this imagined world to the best of our ability, and hopefully come up with something that is entertaining and interesting.
“You know, the love story between Elena and Zubak, these are two people who should never have met and should never have fallen in love. And that was up to Matthias and I. We had to really give that a heartbeat so that that would be believable. That was the one thing we had to make sure that audiences really went with them and (got) sucked into their relationship, which hopefully does happen. But for us, it was really a lot of fun.”
On her most absurd and challenging scenes in ‘The Regime’:
“I wasn’t really dreading anything but I definitely felt nervous about the singing in episode one because it was a really specific choice to have her sing badly. That was not how it was scripted. It was scripted that she gets up, she performs and she sings really well.
“But when we recorded the song, Stephen Frears (director)… he’s standing there, (I’m like) don’t shake your head. Why are you shaking your head? He said, ‘I don’t understand it. Why is she singing so well? It doesn’t make any sense.’ And I said, OK, well, what do you want me to do? He said do it badly.
“OK, OK, now I understand. And so then, it was brilliant because you immediately give the audience permission to lean into just how delusional this woman is. She actually believes she’s singing. She actually believes they adore her. Everyone’s lying to her the entire time. No wonder she doesn’t trust anyone. Absolutely hilarious.
“But that was the one I was the most nervous of, because actually it’s quite difficult to get singing badly right. It’s quite a difficult thing to do. And we didn’t (inform) the rest of the actors, the support artists, who were there that day. They didn’t know what was going to happen.
“I thought, oh my God, what if they just all laugh? That’s gonna be terrible. But no, they were very good. They all just sat there and pretended they were taking it really seriously, and they pretended that they were clapping and really appreciated this wonderful performance from the great Elena Vernham. It’s just so funny. It’s so hilarious.”
(“The Regime” Episode 2 drops Monday, Manila time, on HBO and HBO GO.)
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