Her starring role in the new HBO Max’s new miniseries Mare of Easttown, though, requires what’s arguably her trickiest—and most talked-about—accent yet. Winslet portrays the titular Mare, a high school basketball-star-turned-small-town-detective investigating a murder on the outskirts of Philadelphia. While the show’s got plenty of suspense packed into its dramatic premise, it seems all anyone can talk about after watching the premiere episode is Winslet’s spot-on southeastern Pennsylvania accent. If you’re as fascinated by Winslet’s pitch-perfect Pennsylvania pronunciations as everyone else, keep reading to find out how she nailed it and where Mare of Easttown takes place exactly.
What is Kate Winslet’s accent in Mare of Easttown?
It’s a Delco accent—“Delco” being local slang for “Delaware County,” where many of Philadelphia’s middle-class suburbs are located. “It’s a very specific place,” Mare of Easttown creator and screenwriter Brad Ingelsby—who’s from the area—recently told CBS Philly. “Even within Delaware County, there are people with a really strong accent and then there’s people with a less strong accent. We did a lot of research recording people and narrowing the focus and then landed on the spot of somewhere in the middle where it’s definitely Delaware County, but it’s not as severe as some accents you get to hear in that area.” How is Delco different from other East Coast tongues? “The first thing to know is that Delaware County’s accent—characterized by its rounded vowels and shortened long-e and long-a sounds, perhaps most notably in the pronunciation of the word ‘water’ as ‘wooder’—is highly specific to the Philadelphia area,” W Magazine reports. Another example is how Winslet’s character says her own name, “Mare.” It comes out sounding more like mear. You’ll also notice some weird diphthongs in words like “most” and “don’t.” Earlier this year, Winslet said about mastering Mare’s voice, “It was up there with the hardest accents I’ve ever done, in the top three for sure,” adding that the dialect was so frustrating that it “made me throw things.” She also explained that one of the trickiest things was “to do it well enough that you don’t really hear it… That’s what’s important to me: to make it disappear and blend in.” Philly-area accents are so tough to do, in fact, that lots of movies famously set in the City of Brotherly Love, like Rocky and Silver Linings Playbook, settled on a generic, Noo Yawk-y style of speaking for their characters instead. And Winslet’s previous attempt at the accent—that would be her portrayal of upper-crusty Philadelphian Rose in the smash-hit movie Titanic—is something Winslet now calls “awful,” explaining that back then, she’d yet to fully comprehend the intricacies of authentically sounding like an American. (As W Magazine noted about Winslet’s Titanic performance, “It does not exactly sound much like a Philadelphia accent at all.”)
How did Kate Winslet learn her accent in Mare of Easttown?
Another way Winslet is like the second-coming of Streep? They’re both huge research nuts when it comes to preparing for a role. To get ready to portray Mare, Winslet told USA Today that she “did work with a coach. I would just never assume that I could teach myself how to authentically do a voice from somewhere.” That coach provided Winslet with tapes of a real-life Delco resident, which she listened to every day. “I had a ritual,” Winslet told The Philadelphia Inquirer. “I’d get in the car. I’d put my coffee in the cupholder. The AirPods would go in, and I would have Trish Lauria from Drexel Hill in my ear to and from set every day. That was the voice that kind of resonated with me the most.” (Winslet and Lauria later met in real life, with Lauria calling Winslet “incredible” and “lovely.”) Shadowing real-life Pennsylvania police officers and learning how to talk like them was also part of Winslet’s process, as Detective Christine Bleiler told the Inquirer that Winslet would call her to ask about specific ways to say things. Clearly, Winslet learned the lay of the land in the process. Earlier this year, here’s what she told reporters about familiarizing herself with the greater Philadelphia area: (In case you don’t know, Wawas are like the 7-Eleven of great Philly, and the King of Prussia mall is in the nearby suburbs and is, like, one of the biggest malls in America.)
Where is MareofEasttown set?
Easttown is a real-life township of about 10,000 residents in southeastern Pennsylvania…but not in Delaware County. It’s technically located right on the Delco border in Chester County, even though everyone’s talking about Mare of Easttown (and especially its accents) as being Delco-based. What gives? Inglesby (who grew up in a teeny place called Berwyn, which is partially located with Easttown), told the Inquirer that even though the show is set in Delco, he basically fudged the truth and made Easttown a part of that county because Easttown “sounded like such a generic town name.”
Where was Mare of Easttown filmed?
The Inquirer reported that the series was filmed in both Delaware County and next-door Chester County, as well as parts of Philadelphia. Next, if you love solving crimes, you’ll want to know about Crystal Theobald.
