Mary Elizabeth Winstead tells TV Week about working with husband Ewan McGregor in A Gentleman in Moscow
Mary Elizabeth Winstead was not familiar with Amor Towles’ tale of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, a Russian aristocrat sentenced to house arrest in the attic of the Metropol Hotel in Moscow, until her husband Ewan McGregor was offered the opportunity to star in the series adaptation of the novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. Once she picked up the book, however, there was no putting it down. “It’s just a beautifully written story,” says Winstead. “Every page wraps you up in it. To start with, the count is a delight in every way — so funny, witty, charming and whimsical. And the hotel is also a place that you just want to be in, which is lucky since that’s where every scene of the show takes place.”
Thrilled with McGregor’s opportunity to play this character whose journey through the decades is rich, even as his mileage is low, the project became even more appealing when her husband saw another prospect open. “As he was reading the novel, he started nudging me going, ‘There’s a lady in here who’s very interesting,’” she says. “He was giving me the heads up that maybe there was potential for me to be involved as well.”
Eight years since they last shared screen time, in the third season of Fargo, the two now reunite for another unique love story, this one between a de facto prisoner of the Russian Revolution and a movie star. “Anna Urbanova is a famous actress of the 1920s in Russia. She’s a self-made actress. She’s a bit of a hustler,” Winstead describes her character. “She meets the count at the hotel and she’s instantly intrigued by him being the very old-fashioned gentleman that he is. I think she’s curious to peel back the layers and see what’s underneath. They begin this years-long romance that is up and down and all over the place and a lot of fun to watch.”
The joy extended behind the scenes in Manchester, where the Metropol was built on a soundstage. For the actors, figuring out how to best portray characters that move through the ages within the same location, was a return to basics. “It kind of felt like drama school for all of us,” says Winstead. “In the beginning it was like, what are the accents going to be? I think, ultimately, nobody wanted to see a show with a bunch of actors doing Russian accents to various degrees of ability. We wanted to just capture the feeling of it. And we had a movement coach come in, so we all found the characters through our bodies, in a way.”
The coach worked with the cast members to figure out how the passage of three decades would present itself. “We practiced feeling the weight of time and how that feels in your body,” says Winstead. “How do your knees feel? It’s very subtle. Playing my character from her late 20s to her 50s, she’s not going to be necessarily hunched over. It’s going to be smaller things that change over time, be it physically and emotionally. They all go through an emotional journey that also includes being humbled in a lot of ways.”
The bodies of those who reside at the Metropol also take a toll from the paranoia that comes with always feeling observed by those eager to turn them in to an oppressive regime. “There’s a real tension to that,” says Winstead. “There might be certain things that are stressful about falling in and out of love or falling in and out of favor of people in our lives, but in the case of these characters that could also sometimes be life or death. Really, every day was often a life-or-death situation for them. I think that tension was always felt both physically and emotionally in the characters.”
While predominantly heart-warming, the series also allows the viewer to reflect on matters of a more serious nature. “We’re seeing the building blocks of where Russia is now and how that started,” explains Winstead. “And also looking at how good intentions can be twisted into something very dark and scary in the hands of an authoritarian leader. We really feel that in the show and through different characters who are thinking that they’re doing something for the greater good and finding out that wasn’t the case at all. But also, looking at the count, the way so many people have been dealing with feeling isolated, whether it be from the recent pandemic or circumstances in their lives.”
For McGregor and Winstead, their tenure at the Metropol was nothing but delightful. “It was amazing,” says Winstead. “It really was a dream project, because we loved the roles we were playing and we were getting to do it with one another and be in the same place as one another while working, which is a rarity in our industry. Then, to get to have our son and my stepdaughters visiting the set, which was just such a beautiful set with such great people, and to be able to share that with them, it was an incredible experience.”
A Gentleman in Moscow, streaming Friday, April 26, on Paramount+