Kate Winslet Courts Chaos in Episode 1 of ‘The Regime’

Hail to the chief. Or, in The Regime’s case, hail to the chancellor. In the brand-new series from Succession and The Menu writer Will Tracy, Academy Award winner Kate Winslet stars as Chancellor Elena Vernham, head of a fictional and turbulent country. A new season of VF’s television podcast, Still Watching, will find hosts Hillary Busis, Richard Lawson, and Chris Murphy unpacking the six-episode series as Chancellor Vernham struggles to maintain control of her country, facing challenges to her authoritarian rule from both within and without. For the first episode, Winslet also drops by Still Watching to talk about taking on a comedic role, carefully crafting Elena’s speaking voice, and being too good a singer at Abbey Road.

In the show’s first episode, “Memorial,” we’re dropped into the nameless European nation that’s at the center of The Regime. “I’m choosing to believe that she is the chancellor of Genovia,” says Busis, referencing the fictional country that counts a young Anne Hathaway as royalty in the Princess Diaries franchise. One of the first citizens we meet is Corporal Herbert Zubak, a.k.a. the Butcher of Site Five, played by Matthias Schoenaerts. After being involved in a deadly incident, Zubak is handpicked by Chancellor Vernham for a very specific job. Zubak, Murphy notes, is the only character on the show who feels “salt of the earth”: “It feels like he has a lot of strong ties to the country,” he says. “He cares about his motherland.” 

And then there’s Elena. Winslet’s physician turned authoritarian ruler is curious, bizarre, and intriguing. She seems to be suffering from a severe case of hypochondria; she also seems to have a very unresolved and complicated relationship with her deceased father. But just because she’s a germaphobe with daddy issues doesn’t mean that Elena doesn’t know how to have a good time. At a state dinner, she performs a rousing, if not particularly well executed, musical number that gives a peak into the depths of Elena’s self-delusions. “I feel like Selina Meyer would have done that,” Busis says, referencing Julia Louis-Dreyfus’s beloved Veep character. “Made people watch her at her birthday party sing badly, and then make them clap for her.”  

Elena, however, has bigger problems than hitting a few bum notes. She seems to be fumbling the faux Genovia’s foreign relations, waffling on whether to strike a deal giving America access to the country’s cobalt mines or kill the deal and “stop suckling on America’s teat.” By episode’s end, it seems clear which option she’s chosen.

Elena doesn’t come to this decision on her own. In the premiere, she forms a deep, inexplicable connection with Zubak, one that threatens to disrupt the very delicate balancing act that is Elena’s rule. By the episode’s close, two of her most trusted advisers have been sent to jail, signaling a shift in the regime’s top brass due to Zubak’s influence.

“What is the show arguing about that version of global politics?” asks Lawson. “Obviously, America has an undue influence on too much of the world, and the show is kind of rejecting that. But in doing so, it’s also putting power in the hands of someone who seems to be a bad person.” 

Winslet clearly relishes playing that bad person. “I mean, I just had never played anything like this,” she says on the podcast. “To do something funny that is clever, that’s the dream. I have always wanted to do comedy. To be delivered six episodes of just delicious outrage set in an unreal imagined place with characters that don’t exist—it was just irresistible.”

Winslet sheds some light on how she came up with Elena’s voice, which is part Margaret Thatcher, part Gracie from May December. “When you put a character with a clear, concise, typical R.P. [received pronunciation] accent in a palace, the second that person opens their mouth, the audience is going to think that it’s a monarchy, that it’s royalty,” Winslet says. 

Elena, however, is not a queen. So Winslet worked with a neuroscientist and a psychologist to try to understand how childhood trauma could impact someone’s speech. “This is a woman who is in a declining mental [state] and [an] imagined physical state of decline,” Winslet says. “That has to come from somewhere. It’s not something that’s just happened. It’s probably always been with her.”