Mare of Easttown creator Brad Ingelsby had the characters for his whodunnit kicking around his head for months before he started writing a single word. “I’ve watched too many of these stories,” he told Vanity Fair’s Still Watching podcast. “I know you have to stick the landing or else people are going to be angry at you.” It was only when Ingelsby connected the murder of Erin McMenamin to Mare’s emotional breakthrough that he was finally able to get to work.
Ingelsby settled on young Ryan Ross (Cameron Mann) as the key to unlock both problems. That choice wasn’t just about a revelation that would surprise viewers or one that would be incredibly painful to Mare (Kate Winslet). Ingelsby was determined to find an answer that would also but also push his protagonist to an emotional breakthrough. So, even though John Ross confesses to fathering Erin’s son D.J. then lied and claimed to have killed her as well, Mare eventually discovers that it was actually young Ryan, angry at his father’s infedility, who pulled the trigger.
Ingelsby wanted to keep the killer’s identity a surprise but also not have the Ryan reveal come out of nowhere: “It’s gotta be earned, right? So there’s always the balance. How much of Ryan are we going to show? When do we show him? How do we not tip our hand? How do we have enough of him where you get to that ending and go, ‘Oh, okay. That actually makes sense.’ It was a tricky one.”
In the editing process, Ingelsby and director Craig Zobel found a moment to check in with Ryan in every episode starting with the premiere where Mare herself zeroes in on him as a tightly-wound kid.
In episode 4, the show paused to check in on Ryan’s anxiety around the investigation.
In episode 5, the show revealed Ryan’s capacity for violence.
And though he appeared only briefly in episode 6, Mare showed us that Ryan was still very worried indeed.
Another tactic that Ingelsby and director Craig Zobel employed was to try to craft lines and scenes that could be misinterpreted by the audience. The trickiest one was this misleading interaction between John and Billy in episode 6.
“It was the hardest scene to write because we were always worried that the audience would feel tricked,” Ingelsby says. “And that was the one thing we never wanted to do. There was an edit of that scene where John was really aggressive. Then there was an edit of the scene where John was really sympathetic and then we’ve tricked the audience because we’re lying to them. Who knows if we did it well or not — audiences will have to decide.”
When he first dreamed up Mare of Easttown and decided to center the climax of the story on the life-long connection between Mare and Lori (Julianne Nicholson), Ingelsby says he was inspired by the women he grew up around: “I wanted to write about home and I grew up with a lot of women in my life and my mom had three sisters and we would go to my grandmother’s house every week to have dinner with them. It was just the women. I grew up with a stutter as a kid so I didn’t really like to talk all that much. So I ended up just doing a lot of listening as a kid and a lot of that listening was listening to my mom and her sisters and also my sisters.”
Julianne Nicholson told the Still Watching podcast that she was surprised and impressed to see an HBO whodunnit mystery focus so much on motherhood. As a mother herself, Nicholson was gutted by some of the material she had to play. “The most heartbreaking one for me was when Ryan runs home from school and says, ‘She knows,’” Nicholson choked up while describing the scene. “I’m going to get upset. I have a son that age. They still have a foot in childhood and a foot in leaving the nest and all of that. I mean, it’s great as an actor to have all those things there to draw upon, but it’s also like, ‘Oh no.’”
“I’m so admiring of the way these women were able to juggle so many things and keep the family unit together,” Ingelsby says. “And also have time to support each other and lean on each other. And I just — I so admired that in them and still do. I think that the women are the ones that hold this community together. I love the idea that we could explore how women and mothers and daughters are able to hold each other up.”
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