Guy Pearce was a red herring, but he REALLY wasn’t supposed to be…
Back before we knew the ending to Mare Of Easttown – oh, and SOME SPOILERS! – we have to admit that one of our prime suspects in the murder of Erin was what turned out to be a genuinely nice guy by the name of Richard.
Part of that reasoning is because Richard seemed too good to be true, plus he seemed to show up in Easttown right around the same time that the girls started to go missing.
But another big part of that is because the character is played by Guy Pearce, and at this stage we’re just kind of used to seeing Pearce play the secretly bad guy in movies.
We reasoned – unreasonably, as it turned out – that a big actor like Pearce wouldn’t show up to a big HBO show like this and just play… a nice, normal guy. Which probably says a lot about our trust issues, if we’re being honest with ourselves.
However, even the main writer of the show, Brad Ingelsby, understood that the casting Pearce in the role would likely lead to all of those red herring bells going off.
Ingelsby told Vanity Fair: “I do understand the suspicion. Especially because it’s Guy and he’s such a wonderful actor, but he was always only written as that. It was just a beautiful little relationship that came at the right time in her life that provided some tenderness.”
It turns out that Pearce was only cast in the role when the original actor, Ben Miles, had to pull out at the last minute due to a scheduling conflict. So Kate Winslet simply rang up her friend Guy (they had previously starred together in HBO mini-series Mildred Pierce) and asked him to take the role as a favour.
And as Guy Pearce told Entertainment Weekly, you don’t say no to Kate:
“To have Kate call me and say, ‘I’m doing a show. You have to come and play this role. This is the story. This is the connection between the two characters’. I just go, ‘Well, yes’.”
You can watch all of Mare Of Easttown on NOW right now.
Clip via HBO
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