How Kate Winslet Created Her Self-Deluded Tyrant

We’ve watched HBO’s new six-part original series The Regime, and we can promise you’ve never seen Kate Winslet in a role quite like this.

The Oscar- and Emmy-winning actress stars as Chancellor Elena Vernham, the leader of an unnamed contemporary Central European nation with an authoritarian bent, as the walls begin to close in on her rule. Creator, writer and showrunner Will Tracy says viewers can “expect a bit of high-stakes geopolitical tension, with a healthy dollop of dark humor spooned on top.” 

The Regime follows Elena’s evolution, or perhaps descent, from a charismatic yet unstable democratic leader into an unhinged autocratic despot. She’s on a quest to earn herself and her backwater nation international respect, self-determination and “a seat at the grown-ups’ table of modern geopolitics.”

To get there, she’ll put down any dissent from the citizens she claims to love, jailing not only the leader of the opposition party (Hugh Grant) but also any ministers of her own cabinet suspected of bowing to foreign influence. The chancellor’s newly adversarial stance toward the West pits her against former American allies who are eager for her to fall back in line, like Martha Plimpton’s U.S. senator.

As the cowriter of 2022’s horror-comedy The Menu and a writer and executive producer on Succession, Tracy is no stranger to comedy with a sinister edge, but it’s new ground for Winslet. Not that you can tell from her pitch-perfect performance as Elena, at times charming and at others deeply unnerving. Winslet brings the gravity to “command a cult of personality,” Tracy says but also “the insecurity that is hiding just behind the wall of charisma and strength.”

Like the image of a dictator, everything about Winslet’s character feels carefully constructed: her restrained, vaguely European accent. The way the corner of her mouth sometimes droops when she speaks, but only when in private. Her paranoid fear of humidity and fungal spores (her doctors tell her she has weakened lungs), regarded at times as a nuisance and at others as the literal end of her world. “One of Kate’s great contributions was to recognize how bizarrely off so many of these autocratic leaders seem to be, personally or stylistically,” Tracy explains.

We meet Elena and learn the ins and outs of her nation’s politics through the eyes of Herbert Zubak (Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts). A disgraced soldier hired as a servant/bodyguard, he’s tasked at first with following the chancellor to constantly measure the humidity in her personal space.

“Matthias can play this powerful, terrifying physicality,” Tracy remarks. We see his intimidating presence at work as he silently threatens Plimpton’s Sen. Judith Holt at the palace or administers a savage beating to a would-be assassin. “But then one turn of his head or glance of his eye and the character is a scared and vulnerable little boy.”

It’s that side of Herbert we see in private moments with Elena, as their relationship quickly grows from professional to personal. Herbert becomes her most trusted adviser and closest confidant, his influence accelerating her increasingly autocratic tendencies. “The fate of the nation turns repeatedly on their twisting dynamic. I was interested in the idea of a love story between a woman and a man that is rather toxic and extreme that over time we see is mirroring the other love story of the show, which is that between a leader and her people.”

Miya Mizuno/HBO

The influence Herbert and Elena exert over one another is central to the series. The Regime asks whether Elena is in control of her country, of her health or even her mind. “I suppose the creeping insinuation of the show is that the less she is manipulated from without, the worse things get for her as she succumbs to her own much more powerful self-manipulations.”

Like The Menu, The Regime walks the line between the bleak and the whimsical. It’s a mix that Tracy says is present in some authoritarian leaders he studied for the show. “The real-life figures I researched were so extreme and so powerful that they had become removed from reality in a way that immediately lends itself to comedy. We’re talking about an entire country of millions having to nod along with the whims of a self-deluded tyrant who is telling them the sky is green. The absurdism is baked right in!”

So what’s Tracy’s elevator pitch for The Regime? “[Viewers] will get to watch some of the greatest actors on earth—including the magnificent Kate Winslet—like they’ve never seen them before, in a beautifully designed and costumed show that touches on some of the most fascinatingly scary aspects of our muddled-up modern world. God, I’m terrible at elevator pitches.”

You’re better than you think, Will! We’re sold.

The Regime, Premieres Sunday, March 3, 9/8c, HBO, Streaming on Max