Please be very, very sure you’ve caught up with the latest installment of Kate Winslet’s journey though dreary Pennsylvania before you read this article.
Okay, here we go. That was tough to watch. Poor Detective Colin Zabel, a character we had grown so fond of, took an abrupt bullet to the head in the final confrontation of episode five, with two more episodes of the series to go. Feeling gutted by his death? That’s just what actor Evan Peters and series director Craig Zobel were going for.
Even up to his final day of shooting, Peters was finding new ways for Colin to worm his way into our hearts. In the latest episode of our podcast Still Watching: Mare of Easttown, Peters digs into his connection to Colin, and why a certain scene left him “hysterically sobbing” in his director’s arms.
You can listen to the entire Evan Peters interview here, and read highlights of our conversation below.
When series creator Brad Ingelsby first conceived of Colin Zabel, he thought of the character as a brash, hotshot detective-type who, despite the secret he’s holding about the case in Upper Darby, would walk into Mare’s office like he owned the joint. You can see traces of that take in costume designer Meghan Kasperlik’s wardrobe for the character. “He’s trying to dress to look good,” Zobel said. “Dark suits and stuff.” Zobel liked the contrast: “I thought it was a brilliant, you know, he was dressed like the guy who could do the hotshot detective, but he just wasn’t.”
Peters even took pool lessons, to give that version of the character something to show off. In the end, perhaps it was a relief Zabel got an overhaul: “Pool! I never used it, never got good at it!”
What Peters, Zobel, and Ingelsby landed on, instead, was a new vision for Zabel: an earnest young man caught in a state of arrested development and suffering from a crippling case of imposter syndrome. Zabel taking credit for a case he didn’t actually solve, Peters said, “was just the worst possible thing that he could do. Now he feels like a total imposter. You could play it where he’s overly confident trying to make up for that. Or you could play it like he’s totally insecure and has severe imposter syndrome, and has no idea what he’s doing. I can relate more to that than the other one.”
Peters’s own imposter syndrome reared its head when he and Zobel were trying to make sure they landed Zabel’s drunken moment of extreme vulnerability with Mare in episode three. That scene won Peters raves, but on the day he shot it, he was convinced he had bungled the performance. “The reason Craig and I were emotional and hugging,” Peters explained, “was because I was hysterically sobbing. I thought we didn’t get the scene. I was like, ‘We didn’t get, 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 do it anymore.’ And he was like, ‘It’s okay. It’s cool, man. I think we got it.’… What’s going on with my internal judgment? Where I don’t even know if it’s good.”
All the work Zobel and Peters did to infuse Zabel with the actor’s own endearing qualities—including his admiration for Kate Winslet—pays off to devastating effect when the young detective is taken out just when it seemed like he was turning a corner. “I felt like it was very clever,” Zobel said of Ingelsby’s script. “He’s having his cathartic moment where he’s becoming more active as a character, after we’ve heard his backstory and how he didn’t really solve that case in Upper Darby. It’s just taking a person directly at a point in which they have the most opportunity, and stopping them.” Peters himself, no stranger to a twist after working with Ryan Murphy for most of his career, was shocked by his death scene when he first read it.
But even as we mourn Zabel, it’s important to remember this show isn’t called Colin of Easttown. The final moments of the episode linger on Mare as she tries to process yet another loss. Audio of Mare’s son Kevin in his younger, more innocent days plays over a shot of Winslet’s stunned face. “Mare very much represses anything that looks like feelings,” Zobel said. “She needs to overcome her demons and solve this problem in order to be able to solve the detective story in the last two episodes. The work that she’s doing on herself would naturally come to the surface, especially in the scenario where she’s possibly about to die.”
Zobel sees a connection between Mare’s guilt around her son’s death and the sudden death of her young partner. “She holds a lot of responsibility for Kevin’s stuff and similarly for Colin. That was certainly Brad’s point of view on it,” he said. “This triggered her sense of guilt that she was in some ways responsible for Kevin, the way that any parent would…. It leads you into the third act of the miniseries.”
In order to ensure we would feel as shocked and devastated as Mare by Colin’s death, Zobel and Peters worked overtime to ensure the detective made an impression on audiences in the span of just four episodes. “Credit to Evan,” Zobel said. “He found so many little moments. When he takes her out to dinner, that was actually the last thing that we shot with Evan…. Still, even in that scene, he was accidentally dropping food, leaning into making this guy an adorable guy. You don’t think he’s necessarily going to get with Mare fully, but you hope he gets something good in his life. That was definitely a strategy Evan was pushing into every little bit of everything that he could do.”
Now that he’s successfully broken our hearts, Peters is headed back to more creepy and familiar Murphy-verse territory, playing Jeffrey Dahmer in an upcoming Netflix series. But the actor has hopeful plans to return to more down-to-earth, Mare-like content soon: “In terms of acting, I want to try to do some more everyday kind of projects. I’ve been watching a lot of that stuff recently. It’s authentic, scary, moving, and effective. So I want to try to do some more stuff like that down the pipe, but we’ll see.”
One mystery was solved this week but quite a few remain. Read our best guess at Mare of Easttown’s prime suspect hiding in plain sight.
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