Kate Mulgrew Embraces Her Dark Side for Mr Mercedes Season 3

Kate Mulgrew Embraces Her Dark Side for Mr. Mercedes Season 3

Kate Mulgrew talks about cutting loose in of her most twisted performances yet in Mr. Mercedes Season 3, now available on Peacock.

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Kate Mulgrew Embraces Her Dark Side for Mr Mercedes Season 3

After originally airing on the Audience Network, the acclaimed Stephen King television adaptation Mr. Mercedes has come to Peacock, with all three seasons now available to stream on the digital platform. Among the more twisted characters appearing in the third season is Alma Lane, an embittered woman with links to the murderer Morris Bellamy. Portrayed by Kate Mulgrew, the character manipulates the young man following the grisly killing of noted author John Rothstein, setting the events of the season into motion.

In an exclusive interview with CBR, Mulgrew spoke about what appealed to her to portray the twisted artist hellbent on lashing out at a world that she perceived to have cast her aside, the joy of embracing her dark side and teased her return to the Star Trek franchise later this year as Admiral Kathryn Janeway.

Let’s start at the beginning: How did the role of Alma Lane and the opportunity to join Mr. Mercedes come about?

Kate Mulgrew: They made me the offer as we were finishing the seventh season of Orange Is the New Black, and I was longing to do something entirely different and voila! [Laughs] God heard me because a more perfect role at a more perfect time could not have happened. She’s just completely outrageous in all of the best possible ways and I hit the trifecta because David E. Kelley, as everybody knows, is a masterful writer; he’s a no-lose.

The surprise for me was in the showrunner Jack Bender, with whom I’ve forged an enduring friendship. I don’t remember being directed by someone with so much vitality and so much creative energy and with real sense of abandonment. [He was] carefully disciplined throughout but a feeling of wildness; he really let me go but always knew where I was. It was a little bit of creative kismet there and then the character of Alma Lane [herself]; on those three most important levels, I struck gold.

Kate Mulgrew Embraces Her Dark Side for Mr Mercedes Season 3

I was talking to Jack and he seemed to revel in being able to embrace the more macabre aspects of the story. How was it developing that rapport with him on set on crafting your character and performance?

Mulgrew: It was just an absolute marriage of the minds. We had such an intense, creative simpatico that I think I would’ve followed him anywhere and done anything he asked because, in the end on the screen, it shows that I did do damn near everything. [Laughs] He’s just the kind of director that, just a few times in the lifetime of an actor, you find somebody like that, someone who inspired me and made me think that I could. And that feeling that I had at eighteen-years old and beginning in the business, I fully recovered: That sense of joy, that sense of abandon and that sense that I [couldn’t] wait for for another day of this character. It was just an absolute pot of gold.

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Do you remember the moment where you realized how to best approach your performance as Alma?

Mulgrew: I heard Anthony Hopkins say this the other night so I’m going to paraphrase what I heard that great actor say: If it’s in the writing, it will be in the performance and in every word that’s on the page. I didn’t have to do much except, perhaps, take it down, simplify, relax. All you have to do is just be the character when a character is written as beautifully as Alma Lane was. And to keep her honest, I had to walk a fine line between the outrageous and the genuine because she believes that everything she’s doing is absolutely par for the course while I think that the audience watching her is absolutely horrified by her behavior. It was very freeing to be so completely naughty, I realized I’m a deeply naughty human being. [Laughs] And so are Jack Bender and David Kelley!

How was it having Gabriel Ebert as a scene partner? A lot of your arc involves mentoring his character.

Mulgrew: That’s when you really strike gold when your partner happens to be completely open and very, very smart actor who is rigorously trained. He was just completely game and game in a way that he was extremely present, very prepared and completely willing to go wherever the scene took us. There was not a moment of self-consciousness, not a moment of uncertainty. I felt between Jack and Gabe, I was just sort of flying. It was really fun, it was just terrific. If it was like that all the time, Sam, the world would be full of actors.

Kate Mulgrew Embraces Her Dark Side for Mr Mercedes Season 3

One of things I love about Alma Lane is she is a very cynical, bitter person over how she feels the world and her past with John Rothstein went. Looking back, how do you see Alma?

Mulgrew: What you say is true but that is not what she dwells on; I never met a person who is dark or bitter who dwells on their darkness or their bitterness. I think in Alma’s case, it’s been a slow, simmering and rather gleeful resentment which has now reached the boiling point — which she doesn’t realize until we discover it with her — and that translates into revenge. I think that it’s fun for her to exact her pound of flesh in whatever manner she so chooses and the sky is the limit with Alma Lane because a psychopath with intellectual dimensions — she can paint, she can cook beautifully, she reads voraciously, she fell in love with John Rothstein because of his writing — everything is a kind of regret of the artist.

She fancies herself an artist and now, of course, she thinks it’s too late and rather than go out like that, she’s going to take everybody down with her and it is done systematically and with a kind of marvelous abandon; she’s licking her lips all the way.

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Speaking in terms of Alma being an artist and tapping it your naughtier side for this role, you’ve run quite the gamut from Kathryn Janeway and Red Reznikov to Mrs. Columbo and Dragon Age’s Flemeth. What is the joy as a thespian in getting to paint with darker colors for your performance?

Mulgrew: Life itself, Sam. As we age, life becomes far more textured than it was when we were young and the canvas of my life has been really drawn and written upon and you bring that to bear on every performance you develop after a certain age with, I hope, a kind of depth and courage and kind of shock and surprise that you simply can’t bring to it when you’re young because you’re not there yet. But when you reach down into the bowels of everything that composes regret, resentment, despair, longing and unfulfilled dreams, then you can really bring them into a kind of masterful reality; I hope!

I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up one question about Star Trek: You’re coming back as Janeway in animated form for Star Trek: Prodigy. After spending seven years with her, apart from other media, what is it that brought you back?

Mulgrew: I think you just put your finger on it, Sam: She’s always present in my life. Not a day goes by where I don’t have some reminder or request about Janeway or something to do with the future of Janeway. And when Alex Kurtzman approached me — when I was doing Mr. Mercedes, that’s when he called me — I was curious about it; slightly bewildered about it being an animated series, I didn’t quite understand it. It was explained to me in detail and I thought to myself “Wow, this will be terrific to bring this to young people who may be watching this with their mothers who watched me as Captain Janeway in live-action and it will bring the entire family into the orbit of Star Trek and this is something that I very much want to do.”

Also, I love to use my voice, I love the solitude of the recording booth; I love the freedom of it. Star Trek truly is the gift that keeps on giving.

One last question, what are you hoping audiences will take away from Mr. Mercedes with Season 3 now on Peacock?

Mulgrew: [Laughs] I would like them to be absolutely gobsmacked.

Based on a trilogy of crime novels written by Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes stars Brendan Gleeson, Gabriel Ebert, Jharrel Jerome, Kate Mulgrew, Justine Lupe and Holland Taylor. All three seasons are now available to stream on Peacock.

Link Source : https://www.cbr.com/interview-kate-mulgrew-mr-mercedes/

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