When Kate Winslet received scripts for a project initially titled The Palace, about a fictional, dysfunctional European nation that was languishing under the manicured thumb of a photogenic and paranoid despot, she read through the work with mounting curiosity—and confusion. Here was “this imagined, absurd, unreal world, with a delusional female leader at its center,” Winslet recalls in a recent Zoom interview. “I had never read a character like this before. I had certainly never played anything like this before. And for sure I had a moment of like, ‘Oh my God, why the hell are they asking me?’”
She wasn’t the only person to have big, competing reactions to what would ultimately turn into The Regime, a six-part, darkly dramedic miniseries premiering on HBO this Sunday. Matthias Schoenaerts—who plays Herbert Zubak, the favored homicidal enforcer and adviser of Winslet’s proud yet pathetic Chancellor Elena Vernham—says, “I was laughing, I was disturbed, I was horrified. I was like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’” Watching the show, it’s easy to understand why.
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In the lush, lurid universe of The Regime, which was created by Succession alum (and The Menu cowriter) Will Tracy, characters eat figurative shit and literal dirt. Cold-blooded murders are interspersed with debilitating hormonal hot flashes. Gorgeous palaces are transformed into steamed-potato sweat lodges. A sultry “Santa Baby” send-up distracts from the encroachment of violent rebel forces. Phrases like “mewling vulva” and “cock-mad pharoah” ring out like prisoners’ screams.
“Very often my jaw would just fall,” says Guillaume Gallienne, who plays Elena’s beta hubby, Nicholas, “and at the same time I would burst out in laughter.” Martha Plimpton, who’s cast as an intrusive American senator, was “completely baffled and fascinated” by what she read, describing the work as “hallucinogenic.” Even Stephen Frears, one of The Regime’s two directors (along with Jessica Hobbs) and a seasoned veteran of the industry, found the show’s tone to be “a very, very heady mix,” he says. “I thought it was hilarious and dangerous, and it slightly terrified me as to how we could pull it off.”
Indeed, The Regime is a goofy geopolitical farce, and also a rom-com about a toxic relationship, and also, at times, a tense action flick. Its writers include Tracy’s The Menu collaborator Seth Reiss, the sardonic novelist Gary Shteyngart, and the playwright (and Bodies Bodies Bodies screenwriter) Sarah DeLappe. Its main characters are cruel and brutal and wounded; its subject matter is very funny and also no joke. The most precious commodities in its imagined economy are the sugar beet, cobalt, and that crazy little thing called love, a currency that’s traded and weaponized and desperately sought at all costs. Elena is the chaos merchant at the heart of everything—the person most necessary to pull it all off. And she’s made possible only by Winslet’s fearsome charisma and ferocious commitment to the bit.
“It’s a high-wire act,” says Hobbs.
Winslet admits that “a lot of my preparation was going: I can’t do it. My husband actually videoed me sitting at the kitchen table trying to work with all the scripts everywhere, just sitting there going: I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t. It’s just so daunting.” So she decided to do the kind of thing that her character might: Rather than admit defeat or succumb to self-doubt, she gathered herself up and doubled down on the preposterous.
Winslet’s Elena is immature and imperious, glamorous from afar and nasty up close. “She’s supposed to make us feel shaky,” Winslet says. “She’s supposed to make us feel that we absolutely cannot and should not trust her.” The chancellor sucks people in and ices them out—never with more vigor than when it comes to Zubak, with whom she has a snap-crackling chemistry. She speaks with a laborious lockjaw; she oscillates between diabolical self-preservation and hypochondriac panic. And The Regime, in all its glorious vaingloriousness and deadly whimsy, is the striking, satisfying result.
Some people peruse beach reads or true crime entries in their free moments; others seek out the grind of self-help fare. And then there are folks like Tracy, who describes his comfort genre (or, as he puts it, his “humiliating hobby”) as “books about dictators and oppressive regimes, over and over and over again.”
In 2018, while Tracy was living in London and working in the writers room for Season 2 of Succession, he read a slim volume called The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, an English translation of a 1978 inquiry by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski into the waning days of Haile Selassie. “He was the last emperor of Ethiopia,” says Tracy, “and it’s kind of told almost oral history style through servants and functionaries who worked in the palace.”
The book describes all the fixings of a fall of an empire—the paranoia, the people pocketing silverware at a fancy dinner, the guys sanding bloodstains out of parquet floors—but where it sings the loudest is in its descriptions of Selassie’s minions, a veritable Busytown of “bodyguards, cooks, pillow bearers, valets, purse bearers, gift bearers, dog keepers, throne bearers, lackeys, and maids.”
One man interviewed by Kapuscinski was tasked solely with opening one specific door: “It was an art to open the door at the right moment, the exact instant,” he says, showing his breathlessness through the page. Too early “would have been reprehensible, as if I were hurrying the Emperor out.” Too late, and “his Sublime Highness” might have to—gasp—pause momentarily, “which would detract from his lordly dignity.” Another guy spoke of life as a pillow bearer, a role he held for more than a quarter century:
His Majesty would take his place on the throne, and when he had seated himself I would slide a pillow under his feet. This had to be done like lightning so as not to leave Our Distinguished Monarch’s legs hanging in the air for even a moment. We all know that His Highness was of small stature. At the same time, the dignity of the Imperial Office required that he be elevated above his subjects, even in a strictly physical sense. … Therefore a contradiction arose between the necessity of a high throne and the figure of His Venerable Majesty, a contradiction most sensitive and troublesome precisely in the region of the legs, since it is difficult to imagine that an appropriate dignity can be maintained by a person whose legs are dangling in the air like those of a small child. The pillow solved this delicate and all-important conundrum.
As if that telling weren’t comedic enough, a third worker’s description of his duties reads as downright Tom Wambsgansian. His job? To bow before Selassie every hour, on the hour, so that “His Perspicacious Majesty” could remain aware of the passage of time. “Even though I was a high ceremonial official,” the guy says, “behind my back they called me His Distinguished Majesty’s cuckoo.” (Honestly, fair roast.)
To Tracy, these details were catnip. And eventually he found himself thinking about the potential for an upstairs-downstairs TV show like Downton Abbey, except set in the dying heart of some eccentric regime. Early versions of his scripts weren’t quite right tonally, Tracy says now: too logistical, too procedural, too inside baseball. “It felt like, maybe, a kind of watered-down version of an [Armando] Iannucci-ish thing that I’d seen before,” he says. Refining the geopolitical vision was one thing. (“The clever chap knows a lot about politics,” Frears tells me.) But the key transformation came when Tracy asked himself: “What’s the human story here?”
In The Regime’s opening episode, Elena’s husband, Nicky—a poetry-loving “prat” (Gallienne’s words) who calls her Lenny, speaks to her in French, and is (also per Gallienne) “the only one in the series that’s not scared of her”—describes how they met. “At medical school in Paris,” Nicky says. “I had a wife and baby at the time, but Elena is very persuasive. … I left my family in Paris for good and haven’t seen them since.” It’s the perfect encapsulation of his character: part schemer, part simp. And it also sets up a nice contrast to the real beating heart of the series: the will-they-or-won’t-they connection between Elena and Zubak, in which the “very persuasive” one is usually him.
In early drafts of what would become The Regime, Zubak was a relatively minor character who, after the first 15 pages or so of the script, “just sort of faded into the carpentry and became part of the ensemble,” Tracy says. But he remembers a question that came to redefine not only Zubak, but the thrust of the whole show.
“What if the person who’s standing against the wall listening and observing has been hearing everything, and has been forming opinions about everything he’s been hearing?” Tracy says. “And then he has something to say at the end? And what he has to say makes Elena, for the first time in a long time, feel very powerful?”
This isn’t the first time Schoenaerts and Winslet have been together on-screen; they both appeared a decade ago in the period film A Little Chaos, playing landscape designers at Versailles. And this isn’t technically a breakout performance for Schoenaerts: That would be Rust and Bone, a 2012 French film for which he earned an Oscar nomination. Still, something about the pair’s performances in their scenes together feels fresh and forbidden and entirely new.
As Tracy puts it, their story has “a strange, almost sickening fairy tale quality to it.” They size each other up like predators; they collaborate on homework assigned by a therapist. Their faces are never at ease: Elena’s muscles twitch in suspicion, and Zubak’s veins throb with suppressed (well, sometimes) rage. “It just cracks on and cracks on,” says Schoenaerts. “And it has a tempo that is extremely thrilling to watch.”
Reading Downfall of an Autocrat, I couldn’t help but think about Elena and Zubak. Partly because Zubak’s initial job at the palace—a guy who follows Elena around with a moisture-measuring device, ostensibly to detect mold—might as well have been Her Distinguished Majesty’s cuckoo. But also because of a description of the doomed Emperor Selassie strolling through a park.
“He approaches a flock of flamingos, but the shy birds scatter when he comes near,” reads the passage. “The Emperor smiles at the sight of creatures that refuse to obey him.” Zubak heeds Elena plenty, to be fair. (Even Nicky, who supposedly isn’t scared of her, nevertheless obeys her!) But in contrast to her usual coterie of ministers, who range from the merely kiss ass to the slavishly obsequious, you can see how Zubak stands out as a rare bird indeed, one that sometimes even dares to peck back.
Like the rest of the series around it, the scenes between Elena and Zubak strike an ineffable high-degree-of-difficulty tone that falls somewhere between the cringe laughter of Veep and the grave, ruthless wartime dynamics of Game of Thrones. On the one hand, Zubak is a dangerous man who’s known as the “Butcher.” On the other, dude looks sharp in his holly-berry yuletide sweater! Schoenaerts says the key to nailing the right balance was to play things seriously and trust that the gags would flow naturally.
“The more truthful you become, the funnier and the more absurd it is,” he says. “And in some odd way, I think the absurdity of it all is actually far closer to real life than the dramatic tones that we see. Because life is so absurd. People are so absurd. We’re so all over the place, and we’re tragic, comical beings.”
Throughout his career, Tracy’s stories have tended to leave audiences asking: OK, who’s this about? His characterizations are so specific, and his sense of place is so tightly wound, that it all feels like it must be personal. (I bet you think that Onion headline is about you.) His portrayal of the Pierce family in Succession had Town & Country parsing the who’s-whos; his haute-horror movie The Menu had many a real-life foodie shifting uncomfortably in their bistro chairs. And while you’re watching The Regime, it’s tempting to keep a mental tally of details, the better to triangulate Elena Vernham’s origin and villain stories with real-world people and places.
Like her name—perhaps an homage to Elena Ceausescu, whose Romanian ruler husband, Nicolae, hailed her as “the Mother of the Nation”? (In The Regime, many of Elena’s underlings refer to her as Mother.) Those pronounced daddy issues she’s working with—Marine Le Pen, anyone? Much of the show was shot in Vienna, including at an old Habsburg palace. Plimpton’s character looks and talks like Hillary Clinton, though the actress says she based her power walk on Nancy Pelosi’s. (“She has a very determined, deliberate gait,” she says. “There’s nothing casual about the way she walks.”)
When I compare Elena’s cabinet to the Gerri-Frank-Karl triumvirate of Succession, Tracy notes another piece of creative influence. “They were a bit inspired by Hitler’s big four that he had around him towards the end,” Tracy says. “Even when things were at their lowest, and it seemed like the Soviets were a week from the bunker, and it was hopeless, even then, they were still kind of fighting to be the favorite son. Like, who do you like best? They can’t quite get past that.”
Speaking of the Soviets, other plotlines from The Regime conjure images of Russian history past and present, from the general Rasputin vibes of Zubak’s homeopathic remedies to a deadly, militaristic land grab (and a bunch of impetuous imprisonments) that smacks of Putin’s MO. Frears tells me that Putin also came to mind while he was working on a scene from The Regime’s opening episode in which Elena gives a preening, off-key performance of a song by the soft-rock band Chicago.
“There’s a famous clip of Putin singing ‘Blueberry Hill’ on YouTube,” Frears says. “Look at that, and you’ll understand everything.” In the 2010 clip, which looks and sounds like a surefire deepfake but is somehow all too real, Putin croons an old Sammy Kaye and Fats Domino track in stilted English while a star-studded audience featuring Gerard Depardieu, Goldie Hawn, Kurt Russell, and Kevin Costner applauds him. As Schoenaerts said, it’s the absurdity that gets closest to the truth.
Yes, The Regime can be viewed as a wry political satire. But ultimately, it’s a story about the misallocation of love. Elena frequently reminds the disgruntled citizens of her country that “I love you all, and I bless our love, always.” But really, she’s the one craving love and approval: from her dead, bad dad; from foreign powers; from Nicky and/or Zubak, depending on the day. The Regime demonstrates how too much empty adoration can curdle hearts and minds, how it warps a person when no one ever has the guts (or the death wish) to tell them things like “You’re being weird” or “This is wrong/strange/bad” or even just: “NO.”
When I ask Tracy who pushes back on his worst impulses, he jokes that “within every showrunner, there’s probably a little autocrat wanting to get out.” But thanks to a healthy spirit of collaboration in The Regime’s writers room, Tracy says that his own personal dictatorship was limited to harmlessly obsessing over the specifics of the history, traditions, culture, economy, and politics of the fictional country he’d created. (At one point he even calculated the fake nation’s probable GDP.)
Winslet, meanwhile, found herself buoyed by some crucial pushback from her husband, Ned, as she initially fretted over the development of her role. Whenever he sensed that she was getting “really terrified of something,” she says, he would sit down and mansplain to her a couple of cold, hard facts. “‘We both know,’” says Winslet, imitating Ned, “‘that you do know what you’re doing. We both know that you do really want to play this part.’
“And I said, ‘No, you see, you’re making that up,’” Winslet says, speaking more frantically now, performing the roles of both herself and her better half with ease, a spontaneous one-woman show about vulnerability and diplomacy and love. “‘You see, I don’t want to play this part at all. It’s a stupid idea! I should never have said yes! Phone them up and tell them they can get so-and-so to play the part because they’d be much better than me!’”
She drops her voice back to a soothing, almost whispered cadence, the kind of tone a reasonable guy like Ned might use when approaching a cornered predator or appeasing an unpredictable head of household or state. “He’s like, ‘OK, yeah, OK, sure, yeah, would you like a cup of tea? Glass of wine? Packet of biscuits? Fries?’ I’m like, ‘All of them. Everything.’”
And so it was that peace returned to Winslet’s palace. So it was that she felt the confidence to go as big and bad and bold as possible as Elena and elevate The Regime’s tricky tone. So it was that the world got a new weird and wild TV show to watch and Winslet got a tea/wine/biscuit/fries spread fit for a queen. Some people earn the reign they deserve. And the rest of us? We’re just lucky to watch.
