With her perfectly-coiffed golden updo and form-fitting power dresses, Kate Winslet certainly looks the part of the powerful (fictional) leader Chancellor Elena Vernham in the new HBO miniseries The Regime. In spite of this gravitas, there’s a gleam in the Academy Award-winning actress’s eye that lets the audience know she’s not only in on the joke; she’s laughing too.
Aside from popular turns in HBO series like Mildred Pierce and Mare of Easttown, both of which earned her Primetime Emmy Awards for Best Actress, Winslet doesn’t often grace the small screen. Here she makes a welcome exception to play Elena, a ruthless yet clueless autocrat shepherding her unnamed central European nation to certain doom over the course of six lavish episodes. In an interview with The New York Times, Winslet said she took the opportunity to play the chancellor because she “wanted to do something that felt absurd,” adding that the character is both “fearless” and “terrified of the world.”
This fearfulness is on full display in the first episode of the series, “Victory Day,” which premiered on March 3, 2023. The entire episode takes place inside a cloistered palace that’s been draped in sheets of plastic to thwart the mold Elena is convinced lurks everywhere, threatening her health and wellness with every breath she takes. The would-be world leader (her fictitious country is tiny and not a member of NATO, we learn in episode one) suffers from paranoia, hypochondria, and agoraphobia, forcing staff members to acquiesce to her bizarre quirks.
Audiences soon meet Herbert “The Butcher” Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), a deeply conflicted soldier known as one of the “Butchers of Site 5.” Those soldiers were dispatched to murder citizens protesting the country’s rich cobalt mines, a source of great income for the nation … but even greater air and water pollution for the Populus. The bloody massacre is a subtle indicator for attentive viewers: There’s clearly no freedom to protest under Chancellor Vernham’s regime, and despite her repeated assurances that she “loves” her people, she’ll stop at nothing to remove them if they get in her way.
Indeed, Elena hires Zubak precisely because he acted so viciously in her name. She gives him the absurd job of using a handheld device to measure the humidity of each space she enters, and he takes his job as seriously as one could. Even in these early moments, we see the dynamic between the two characters clearly, but when Zubak savagely attacks a protestor who infiltrates the palace and gets scarily close to Elena, their relationship quickly deepens. Soon Zubak is Elena’s personal everything, dismissing the staff members who mistreated him and quietly advising Elena on state affairs. We look forward to seeing how much influence Zubak has over Elena as the series progresses.
The Regime was created by Will Tracy, the writer behind HBO’s Succession and the Ralph Fiennes-lead satire The Menu. Both of those productions offered biting commentaries on wealth, class, and society, and Tracy seems poised to explore those inequities in The Regime as well. Winslet told The Times that this is “not a documentary, it is not a recreation of historical events,” but Tracy admits he read up on authoritarian regimes around the world while writing the script. He determined that leaders from places like Russia, Romania, and Syria often have “a shaky relationship with reality” and “a desperate need for survival,” and both of those attributes come through loud and clear in the character of Elena Vernham.
Winslet appears to be having a blast portraying the subtly over-the-top character. In once scene, Elena sends a Christmas message to her people in which she dresses in a fur-trimmed mini skirt and coos a weirdly sexy version of “Santa Baby” to the masses. They may be dying from state-inflicted pollution and starving from famine, but certainly a song from their beloved leader will cheer them up! It’s the same preposterous notion as Marie Antoinette saying, “Let them eat cake,” and we all know how well that worked out for her.
There’s plenty of arch-humor to be found in The Regime. Their official vegetable is the (Dwight Shrute-approved) sugar beet, and Elena enjoys spending time chatting with her father, the former chancellor of their nation, who happens to be dead. Never fear, however; they’ve rigged up a hyperbaric chamber for his corpse to lie permanently in state, even if he is getting a bit “spotty.”
Shot on site inside the magnificent Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria, The Regime is worth watching for the stunning sets, costumes, and production value alone. Yet it will be Winslet’s performance as the vulnerable yet fearsome head of state that keeps audiences riveted. If the first episode is any indication of what’s to come, her turn as Elena Vernham could earn Winslet a third Primetime Emmy Award for Best Actress in a Series.
The Regime also stars Guillaume Gallienne, Andrea Riseborough, Martha Plimpton, and Hugh Grant. It airs every Sunday night on HBO through April 7 and will stream exclusively on Max. We’re looking forward to seeing what happens when (if?) Elena finally works up the courage to leave the palace grounds!
(featured image: HBO)
