The Cast and Creatives of The Regime on the Humor and Misery of a Fictional Autocracy

We recently sat down for a conversation on Max series The Regime with actor and executive producer Kate Winslet, actors Andrea Riseborough and Guillaume Gallienne, showrunner/executive producer/writer Will Tracy, and directors and executive producers Stephen Frears and Jessica Hobbs. Will Tracy found inspiration for the series in his passion for reading histories about empires and biographies of autocratic leaders. Of The Regime’s leading lady, Chancellor Elena Vernham from a fictional country said to be situated in Middle Europe, Tracy studied how authoritarian leaders tend to turn their most embarrassing or ostentatious idiosyncrasies into their greatest assets. Kate Winslet immediately leaned into this absurdism in her meticulous crafting of Elena, using details in the script (such as the character’s frequent chats with the corpse of her dead father) as a gateway into her backstory. 

Actors Andrea Riseborough (Agnes) and Guillaume Gallienne (Nicholas) both play characters that are beholden to the whims of Winslet’s erratic Elena: Riseborough described how Agnes has been stripped of her femininity by Elena, while Gallienne’s Nicholas is demoted from the role of a husband to “more of a brother” throughout the course of the series. Though the circumstances of the characters are decidedly miserable at times, Riseborough described the experience on set as glorious and joyful, in being surrounded by so much incredible talent. Winslet added that some scenes were so riotously funny, that multiple people had to excuse themselves from the room to get the laughs out during filming.

Jessica Hobbs, having recently wrapped The Crown, found the shift from a historical to fictional portrayal to be refreshing and fun, though Stephen Frear still drew from real-life dictators to find the dramatic irony in their charisma. As Hobbs mentioned, the detail that each actor and artist brought to the characters, costumes, and design brought The Regime to life in the “most unexpectedly brilliant ways.”

Watch the full conversation below.

Kate Winslet stars in this limited series as the Chancellor of an unnamed Central European nation that is unraveling behind the palace walls.