THE SCENE: MARE OF EASTTOWN SEASON ONE, EPISODE THREE
At almost exactly the halfway mark of Mare of Easttown, the first of several curveballs in this twisty whodunit comes hurtling at Kate Winslet’s Detective Mare Sheehan. Sitting at a local bar and on the verge of making a potentially life-ruining decision, Mare runs into her new young partner, Detective Colin Zabel (Evan Peters), who is three sheets to the wind after his own no good, very bad high school reunion. Their exchange lasts less than five minutes, but during that time Winslet generously lets Peters snatch the spotlight as Zabel runs the full drunken gamut of despair, sarcastic humor, and unsubtle flirtation.
It’s a pivotal scene for the series, both setting up Zabel’s arc and establishing him as a viable romantic interest—at least in his mind—for Mare. It’s also a scene that transformed significantly as series director Craig Zobel and Peters worked on it. The duo decided that the character of Zabel, written as a brash hotshot with a lot of swagger, would work better as a troubled young man plagued with imposter syndrome and a big secret to keep. The idea behind this scene, then, was to show Zabel at his most appealingly vulnerable while signaling some chaotic turmoil lurking behind his buttoned-down demeanor. It was also crucial in landing the emotional impact of what happens with Zabel in a later episode.
This deep dive focuses mainly on episode three, but contains some discussion of the rest of the series. If you’re not all caught up on what happens to Mare, Zabel, etc., proceed with caution.
When series creator Brad Ingelsby wrote this scene, he always intended for it to be Zabel’s entry into Mare’s romantic sphere. But the approach changed dramatically when Craig Zobel took over for departing series director Gavin O’Connor, and was interested in a different angle on the Evan Peters character. Zobel was tasked with somewhat reinventing the series while still incorporating the footage Hood had already shot from multiple episodes. It was an unenviable task. “I wanted to do some things differently, but I wanted to make sure [it matched] the stuff that already existed so that we’re in the same world,” Zobel says. One opportunity he may have seen was in the reinvention of Colin Zabel.
There’s still some lingering evidence of the original Zabel concept in Peters’s wardrobe. The nice shirts and slick overcoat were meant for the flashier version of the character, the one Peters took pool lessons in order to play. “But the more we did it,” Peters says, “I mean, he’s living with his mom. He’s kind of stuck and stunted and trapped.” The nice clothes, then, just became another brick in the imposter syndrome wall Zabel constructed around himself.
This new, more anxious version of the character they constructed, though, might not have boldly sauntered up to Mare at the bar without even more liquid courage sloshing around inside him than was written on the page. Zobel is not only carrying insecurities about this new case, he’s also burying the secret that he took credit for another investigator’s work on his last one.
“Craig and I met to talk about Zabel and this is a scene that came up,” Peters says. “I said, I think he should be shitcanned. He has so much that he’s hiding. He seems like he has it all together. By the time you find out in [episode] five that he’s been carrying this thing this whole time, you want to see him at the bar and go, man, there’s something behind this.” Peters’s own insecurity about portraying this new, more emotionally chaotic Zabel, served as added fuel to the scene.
Peters, Winslet, and Zobel shot the bar interaction at the beginning of the day, at around 8 a.m. or 9 a.m.. Though Peters jokingly cites his own 20s spent “blowing [his] brains out” with substances as solid research for playing drunk, he was given a little early morning help: “When I was taking the shots on the scene, I was doing apple cider vinegar. It has a very acidic, strange taste to it. But if you drink enough of it, it starts to taste good. So it sounds very similar to booze to me.” Peters isn’t sure if it was the vinegar that reddened his face and made his veins pop out though: “I guess that sort of happens when I get intense or emotional. Veins popping out of my freaking head.”
Peters also leaned heavily on long nights spent with his own brother, Andrew Peters, in order to nail Zabel’s chaotic yet charismatic journey through a drunken bender. “My brother is absolutely hilarious when he drinks,” Peters says. “He’s a very sort of dry, quiet man but once he starts knocking back a few, he is just ripping up the dance floor.… I channeled him a lot, thinking about what it’s like to be back at a bar in St. Louis binge drinking with all the guys.”
Another tactic Peters employed, a favorite of his, was playing songs to help get him in the right mindset. The episode itself is called “Enter Number Two,” a reference to the Gordon Lightfoot tune “If You Could Read My Mind,” where a lyric—“enter number two, a movie queen to play the scene”—describes a new love interest. “At one point we had that song in the episode,” Ingelsby says, “it was the moment Zabel really kind of entered [Mare’s] life as a romantic interest. She has these two guys, how is that going to play out?” The Lightfoot song didn’t make it into the final cut. Instead, the song playing on the sports bar’s jukebox is the Killers’ “Mr. Brightside.” It’s a classic-rock reframing of a 2004 smash hit sure to make millennial viewers feel an ache in their bones, and appropriate for a high school reunion after-party attended by the 34-year-old Peters.
But it was a different song—2010’s mournful “Where’d All the Time Go” by Dr. Dog, which coincidentally happens to also be a current TikTok hit—that Peters cued up to get in the mood of someone fresh off a high school reunion where he had to see his ex. “That feeling of being in this long relationship,” Peters says, “and it ending badly.” Zabel is also holding on to the secret that he passed off someone else’s detective work as his own in order to advance his career. “That ultimately makes him feel like an imposter and a fake and a phony,” Peters says. “I think he’s been trying to kill that with booze.”
In order to channel Zabel’s sad-sack frustration over wanting Mare to see him as a viable romantic option, Peters also listened to John Mayer’s “New Light.” The lyrics read, in part: “Oh, you don’t think twice ’bout me / And maybe you’re right to doubt me but / But if you give me just one night / You’re gonna see me in a new light.” As Zobel’s camera stays tight on the only two faces in the room who matter for these four and a half minutes, Zabel makes his flirtatious play and Winslet’s Mare shoots him a very knowing look in return.
For Peters, Zabel’s attraction to Mare is tied up in a lot of other messy emotions. “Mare becomes this sort of beacon of light,” Peters says. “Despite all of her secrets and shortcomings, she feels very honest. If he works with her well and solves this case authentically, I think that can be his redemption.” Peters also acknowledges Winslet’s “obvious beauty” as a key aspect of Zabel’s interest. For Mare, the mix of emotions around Zabel are even messier. In the fifth episode, Zabel dies suddenly and shockingly as he and Mare track down the man who has kidnapped and imprisoned two local girls. In the final moments of that episode, Mare sits in shock over what has transpired, and audio of her son Kevin as a child plays in her mind. It’s evidence that, for Mare, her young partner was more of a kid to be protected than as a man who has his heart set on her.
The connection between the two characters runs even deeper than what’s on the page. “I hate the word meta,” Peters says of his professional admiration for Winslet. “I don’t even know what it means. But okay, I’m going to try to learn from Kate. I’m gonna try to do the best job that I can. Colin is also going in there trying to learn from Mare.”
Winslet, who was also an executive producer on Mare, is a largely reactive scene partner here, and Peters, in the grips of his own imposter syndrome and riddled with anxiety over taking such a big swing with Zabel’s sloppy drunkenness, was grateful for her support. “It was a roller-coaster shoot,” Zobel recalls. “I think Evan, all of a sudden, was really invested in making sure that we got there.”
“Kate is an amazing person and really empathetic and compassionate and looking out for everybody and a team player and down to earth,” Peters says. “She’s basically reacting off of me being a drunken idiot. She was very patient and gave me the time to do that.… I have my insecurities about every scene. She’s just been very supportive and very there for me. Coming from Kate it’s really an honor.”
After several takes, both Winslet and Zobel were more than satisfied. “I was over the moon,” Zobel says. “I could tell it was special when we were shooting that thing.… I remember hugging [Peters] at the end. It was emotional.” That’s a bit of an understatement; Peters was a wreck. “The reason that we were emotional and hugging was because I was hysterically sobbing,” Peters says. “I thought we didn’t get the scene. I was like, ‘We didn’t get it, we didn’t get it. I can’t do this. I’m terrible. I’m going to shadow you, Craig, and be a director because I can’t fuckin’ do it anymore.”
Winslet tried to help Peters move on. “I was like, ‘Oh, God, I didn’t get it,’” Peters says. Winslet replied, in brisk Mare fashion: “Let’s go get a cup of coffee. We’re great. We’re done.” It was only when the episode aired and the scene received raves that Peters understood what he had accomplished. “I was surprised…I was,” he says. “I thought I failed miserably.”
“He’s selling himself short,” Ingelsby says. “Evan’s wonderful.” Zobel agrees and adds that he would be thrilled to work with Peters again. “I do feel like he elevated that character,” Zobel says. “He found a way to create a unique guy that you recognize. You’re like, I know that guy, he does live with his mom, but he’s such a good guy.”
Nailing this scene not only cemented Zabel as an audience favorite and revealed even further depths of Peters’s talent, but it put everyone watching the show in Mare’s shoes when Zabel eventually dies. According to Ingelsby and Zobel, Mare’s horror and grief over Zabel are the catalyst for her therapeutic breakthrough which, in turn, helps her crack the case. In other words, without this scene, the show doesn’t work quite as well. And all it took were some tears, apple cider vinegar, and a little John Mayer.
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