Matthias Schoenaerts had worked with Kate Winslet before, but never like this. Never as a lackey engaging in a psychosexual power play with a capricious dictator convinced bacteria is flooding her palace. It almost goes without saying that is far less restrained than Schoenaerts and Winslet’s previous screen romance, the largely forgotten 2014 period film .
“We both were like, ‘OK, so what is this mad piece of work that we’re reading?’ ” Schoenaerts says of his first conversation with Winslet about the HBO . “ ‘Is it a comedy? Is it a drama? Is it both?’ We were trying to figure out what the tone was going to be.” Will Tracy, who created and co-wrote the show, has a résumé heavy on humorous genre hybrids, including , and .
According to Schoenaerts, Tracy was careful never to define by any specific label. Winslet’s lisping, germophobic nationalist is sort of the Selina Meyer (of ) of Central Europe, but what’s happening around her — human rights crises, a plunging economy, sink-or-swim trade negotiations — is serious business. “We decided not to do tongue-in-cheek stuff,” Schoenaerts says.
“We said, ‘Let’s just go as if this was an existential drama.’ ” The 46-year-old Belgian actor plays Herbert Zubak, a murderous soldier appointed to follow Winslet’s Elena Vernham around, taking humidity measurements to ensure her supposed well-being. Herbert knows an opportunity when he sees one, though.
He quickly becomes Elena’s confidant,.