Hang Evan Peters' Drunk Scene From 'Mare of Easttown' In the Louvre
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The scene begins with "Mr. Brightside." It's the type of song you'd absolutely hear in a small town Pennsylvania dive bar—a place with a Miller Lite sign hanging in the window. It's also the perfect soundtrack for a near-sloppy drunk detective, played by Evan Peters, to come out of his cage in front of his new partner.
In Episode Three of HBO’s excellent new detective thriller Mare of Easttown, Kate Winslet’s Mare is sitting alone at the bar, drinking a Rolling Rock, as usual, while contemplating a pretty serious choice she’s just made that could come back to bite her. She’s pensive and visibly anxious. That is, until Peters’ Detective Colin Zabel appears, greets her with a slightly slurred, very Pennsylvanian “Well, howdy-doo there, partner,” and the air shifts. Prior to this scene, all we knew of Mare's fresh-faced new partner is that he's a clean-cut do-gooder, eager to please. He's a chipper young go-hard detective with Boy Scout energy. It's immediately evident from Peters' body language that this is a side of Zabel we haven't seen yet. Wobbly, smirking, narrow-eyed. Simply put, he's very drunk.
And he's spotted his new detective partner Mare across the bar and naturally, come over to say hello. But man, has he had a couple drinks too many. He flags the bartender down with an arm and a loud “bar guy!” which he quickly follows up with an apology. He proceeds to order “one more for m’ladyyyy” for the unimpressed Mare, who looks like she’d rather melt into the sticky bar top if she could. But, as it goes when you’re too drunk to pick up on your companion’s social cues, Detective Colin Zabel begins to recount his evening for her.
He's out because “it’s the post-game, the boyyssss” following his 15-year high school reunion. His eyes look drunk, empty—if Peters did not himself drink seven Rolling Rocks before shooting this scene, then his eyes can act, too. It’s perfect. He blinks them slowly, for long enough that you can tell he’s a bit dizzy, and breathes through his mouth like he’s considering, whilst ordering himself a shot, if his esophagus might reject it. But fuck it. A shot of Jameson, please. He could use another.
He’s had a bad night; his ex-fiancé was at the reunion. “I still don’t know what happened,” he explains to Mare, who’s listening more intently now, but with the amused smirk of someone significantly more sober than the company. “I woke up one morning and she said ‘nooope, not in love with you anymore.” Zabel does a little faux-surprise gasp after that, as if to offer Mare a suggestion for an appropriate reaction to his story. Can you believe that? His accent comes out stronger as he slurs through his sadness. He was introduced to Mare’s case as a big-shot detective in the area, but his slip into a thicker Pennsylvanian accent reveals he’s really just a hometown boy, not so different from Mare after all. It’s a brilliant character choice, subtle and yet deeply revealing. This guy has let his guard down. And his brow is glistening in a way that it can only when you’ve spent the past three hours drinking heavily in a crowded bar. I refuse to believe there’s a makeup artist with a spritz bottle of water on hand. That man is sweating straight cheap beer.
But Zabel isn’t quite drunk enough to fill you with secondhand embarrassment or make you cringe. Instead, Peters’ Detective Zabel is on the very cusp of incoherent, on the edge of disappointing you but not there yet, and instead funny, blunt, relatable. It’s an artful drunkenness—too honest, too emotional, but not at the point where he needs assistance walking. Not yet, anyway. That’s for his high school friends to worry about later. For now, he is still comically, almost lovably inebriated in a sad puppy way that makes you want to put your hand on his back and tell him in a chipper voice that maybe he doesn’t need another shot of whiskey! But not actually stop him because you can’t tell him what to do, you don’t have the heart.
The scene comes to a close when Zabel’s friends appear across the bar to call him over for shots. “Fuck yes!!!!!” he howls as if in a frat house, unquestionably too drunk to do another shot. This’ll be the one that ensures he’ll fall asleep in the back of his cab home, no doubt. But for now, he’s still with Mare—maybe even flirting with Mare?!—until he finally picks up on his cue to leave. He gets a little turned around on his way back to the other side of the bar, but then he’s gone as quick as he came.
On a technical level, what Peters achieves in this scene is a true acting feat. That footing he finds, just on the brink but not overdoing it, is a honed skill. “Seeing bad drunk acting is probably like watching an actor trying to squeeze out tears,” Australian actor Richard Roxburgh once told the New York Times. “It’s kind of fingers-on-a-blackboard excruciating.” Acting drunk is notoriously challenging as it can so easily cross the line into fake-looking or over-exaggerated. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Mads Mikkelsen, who starred in the Oscar-winning acting drunk masterpiece, Another Round, offers some insight: “Two, three, maybe four glasses–how to approach that…It's the next level that's the tricky one, once you're Charlie Chaplin-drunk, when you're all-in.” It’s a delicate balance, and in episode three of Mare of Easttown, Evan Peters is giving a masterclass. He displays all the tips the experts suggest—from the glazed-over eyes to trying, perhaps counterintuitively, hard not to appear drunk—perfectly in this four-minute scene. You can practically smell the booze on his breath through the screen.
Hang it next to Moira Rose trying to pronounce Herb Ertlinger in the canon of stellar acting drunk performances, and then please, can someone grab Evan a glass of water and help me get him to bed.
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