How Kate Winslet Turned Into the World’s Most Ridiculous Dictator for ‘The Regime’
The brilliance of Kate Winslet’s performance in The Regime is that, from beginning to end, something about it feels off. The voice, the look, the movement—something’s very amiss in the calibration. Winslet brilliantly embodies that internal discombobulation. “This is a woman in an imagined mental and physical state of decline,” the Oscar winner tells me. “We allowed for those things to be manifestations of something more traumatic that had learned to live inside of her body—but that she had had to learn how to hide. I was playing someone who’s always wearing a mask of some kind.”
A silly mask, maybe, but a mask nonetheless. In The Regime, which premiered Sunday night on HBO, Winslet portrays Elena Vernham, the chancellor of a fictional country in crisis in Central Europe who falls for a disgraced military official (Matthias Schoenaerts) just as a movement brews to overthrow her rule. Created by Succession’s Will Tracy, the series plays like a farcical drama, with Vernham as absurd as she is terrifying. “Amongst a lot of these authoritarian figures, one commonality is that when they arrive on the scene, there’s something about them that is seen as not what a leader is supposed to look like,” he says. Winslet, also an executive producer on the project, clicked with that idea immediately as she and Tracy got to talking. For example: “I knew right away that it wasn’t going to make sense for me to play her using my own voice.”
Such idiosyncrasies often end up being a dictator’s “superpower,” Tracy argues. “They weaponize their quirks.” For the face of this tonally tricky six-part series, he knew he’d need a powerful, forceful actor to immediately sell an audience on the bit—the sense of, “Yes, I think that person could, with an iron grip, command the undying loyalty of millions.” In other words, he needed a star. “Someone who has a kind of uncanny, world-historic level of magnetism and charisma—which Kate has,” he says. Tracy also needed someone who could be wildly, deceptively funny. Winslet proved up to that task, too, even if she hadn’t had as many chances to show off that side of herself before. Not that you’d know it.
Fans of her satirical episode of HBO’s Extras or her darkly funny work across indies like Eternal Sunshine and the Spotless Mind know Winslet to be more than adept at comedy. It’s just not something she’s been asked to do very often. “I had to accept early on that…there was nothing in her that I had ever come across before,” she says. “I had never played anything like this.” Winslet came into The Regime ready to play by the rules of comic acting beat by beat, even with the license to try anything and everything. Her accent work is hilariously singular, no surprise given her proven range—but even there, she walked uncharted territory. “I’m always doing dialects of one kind or another, like Mare of Easttown or back to Titanic, and there’s always a coach who’s teaching me and making sure I’m fucking doing the damn thing,” she says. “To suddenly be doing something that actually was so varied in range, and also really, really in her body—it was quite scary to be doing that by myself.”
While Winslet’s work, from the stiff physicality to the muffled lisp to the outrageous hysterics, all build toward successful belly laughs, she describes her character-building work in surprisingly familiar terms. “Comedy just isn’t funny if you’re trying to make it funny,” she says. “It’s the circumstance—it’s the absurdity of what they’re doing in that world and what they’re saying.” She began by thinking about Elena’s childhood, consulting a neuroscientist and a psychologist to explore how a traumatic upbringing—particularly, a father who instilled a palpable sense of shame—could manifest in the way she moves through the world. Her peculiar vocal inflections are emphasized far more when she’s in an intimate moment with her late father than when she’s getting down to business with an American diplomat (Martha Plimpton). She fills dead air, too, by propping herself up. “She’s constantly asking people [if] she looks nice, never waiting for a response and always just telling it to herself,” Winslet says. “These weird, twisted affirmations that go on are all part of her sickness.”
Those scars are visualized in the costuming. ”Nobody quite knows how she’s going to present herself at any given moment,” says Oscar-nominated costume designer Consolata Boyle. “At just one moment, she can be dressed immaculately in a most beautifully-cut suit, and then we can travel with her where she’s in a fashionable military uniform with gold-bullion trim.” In the show’s design, Elena communicates her state of mind through a dizzyingly rotating wardrobe—one that’s always fitting just a tad too strict. “She’d dress in ways that are overtly sexual with just how tight those costumes were—and that I was occasionally sewn into,” Winslet says. “She uses her physical self in a way that is completely inappropriate at times, but she simply doesn’t have the emotional language with which to communicate what she thinks, how she feels.”
As Boyle, who was brought into the project by director Stephen Frears, describes the costuming evolution, “Elena can move from the absurd to the terrifying to the manipulative to the paranoid, all in almost one day. To create that reality was the challenge.” Tracy sees such a religious dedication to dressing how she feels as reflecting Elena’s tragic truth: “It’s part of what’s broken about that person. She suspects deep down, ‘Maybe that’s all I am.’”
There was also the matter of maintaining a throughline of humor. One day, Boyle brought Winslet the idea of adding red lining to the cape that Elena wears when she announces a new, self-congratulatory land-reform policy. Then came the fitting, and as Winslet took a deep breath in (remember, these are tight garments), there she saw it in all its ghastly gaudiness, giving the scene a new dimension. “That damn red lining!” Winslet remembers thinking in the moment. “Consolata just fell about on the ground laughing. She couldn’t stop. I was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to go with the red lining.’”
“The more power you get, the more out of touch you become, the more ridiculous you become, and in some ways, the more laughable you become,” Will Tracy says. “That’s always how I saw Elena a little bit, and Kate saw this immediately as well.” This guided the pair’s approach to telling a story about an authoritarian figure at a time when authoritarianism is on the rise—while also keeping their feet planted firmly in their own bizarro universe.
Winslet had no model when it came to crafting Elena, whose ailments include an aversion to humidity, a profound fear of germs, and a clear dictator complex. “There have been horrendous dictators for centuries, and there will be for centuries to come, and people will draw from the show whatever they choose to, precisely because of that geopolitical backdrop,” she says. “But it was my job to always make sure that I was sticking by the choices that I was making to play this delusional woman living in a fictional country in an invented part of Central Europe.” Tracy points to The Regime’s central, twisted love story to develop this character outside of any obvious allegorical framing, and toward something more specific to her flaws: “She created the state that abused this guy, and he’s part of the mass throngs of devotional millions who have warped this person’s brain with fame and power.”
That warping effect is never more evident in the premiere episode than when Elena sings Chicago’s “If You Leave Me Now” at a state dinner. She is utterly, magnificently terrible. Winslet was first tasked to record the scene at the iconic Abbey Road, where the Beatles recorded, and she tried to sing it, well, not terribly. Stephen Frears told her the performance simply wasn’t working. She asked what she should do to fix things; he gave her one clear direction: “Sing it badly.”
“It’s actually quite difficult to sing badly, to find the really bad version of the bad key and keep doing the same thing every time,” Winslet says with a laugh. Of course, Winslet being Winslet, she nailed the assignment.
It took awhile to get there, but the scene had been core to The Regime from its earliest inception. It was there from the very first version of Tracy’s pilot. “The autocrat on stage singing a soft rock song,” as the creator describes it. Somehow, there’s no better way to sum up the most ridiculous achievement of Winslet’s career.
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