'Mare of Easttown' HBO: How Kate Winslet nailed the accent

Barely 11 minutes into the first episode of “Mare of Easttown,” Kate Winslet goes where few actors have gone before. Television Inside Kate Winslet’s Philly culture crash course for ‘Mare of Easttown’ The actor explains the research that went into her character in HBO’s buzzy crime drama — including the “mythical place” she visited to feel at home. She points to features like the “obviously tricky ‘o,’” formed closer to the front of the mouth so that home sounds like hewm, and “the way people from Delco kind of smush words together” so “words like wouldn’t and couldn’t become wuh-ent cuh-ent.” Another vexing quirk is the short “a,” which varies dramatically depending on the consonant before it, so sad is just sad, but mad is closer to “meeyad” — and a throwaway line like “really bad crap” becomes a linguistic minefield. And that meant having the people that populated the community sound true to life.” To master the distinctive Delco accent, Winslet worked with her longtime dialect coach, Susan Hegarty, who first collaborated with her on “Titanic” and has helped her in more than a dozen projects since, including “Revolutionary Road” and “Contagion.” “Kate is an accent nerd. “I couldn’t really phonetically learn, I just had to keep hearing it, keep hearing it,” says Winslet, whose driver, John Dooley, was, at her request, a Delco native with a pronounced accent.