EXCLUSIVE Interview: Guillaume Gallienne on playing Kate Winslet’s husband in HBO’s The Regime

The Regime, HBO’s six-part limited series, is a dark comedy that tells the story of life within the walls of a modern authoritarian regime as it begins to unravel. It stars Kate Winslet as Chancellor Elena Vernham, a populist leader who has grown increasingly paranoid and unstable when she turns to a volatile soldier, Herbert Zubak (Matthias Schoenaerts), as an unlikely confidant. As Zubak’s influence over the chancellor continues to grow, Elena’s attempts to expand her power eventually result in both the palace and the country fracturing around her.

Kate Winslet had earlier explained about her role, “It’s a twisted love story about two people who should never have fallen in love. “But it’s also a geopolitical satire where, at times, nothing makes sense at all and things that happen are so absurd all you can do is laugh your head off.”

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 Comedy is can be a very difficult genre. Guillaume Gallienne who plays the role of Nicholas, Elena’s (Kate Winslet) husbandwhose loyalty to his wife leads him to support her strangest impulses in the HBO series The Regime says on the method of playing his role, “The preparation wasn’t that hard. I worked with a friend of mine who’s a famous French actress and she’s half English and has this same sort of intelligence as Kate Winslet has. So I knew how to be with a strong and intelligent woman. It was great to rehearse with her. I felt prepared but didn’t have the time to write.”

Further on his experience of working with Kate Winslet for The Regime in an exclusive interview with Firstpost, he explains, “Everything was so easy and the directors were so loving, they were so curious how we felt and how we thought about the scene. They gave us a lot of freedom in inventing the scenes which was great. I was living with Kate for a large part of the shooting so we could talk about our scenes and rehearse.”

“We worked in great spirit and it didn’t feel harassing at all, it was a fantastic feeling of team work and we got along really well. It was very easy. The first assistant director would say- ‘Hello darling, would you mind sitting on the chair for two seconds so that I could check the frame?’ It was divine!”