The Regime: Kate Winslet Breaks Down Elena’s Horribly Off-Key Serenade — Plus, Grade the Premiere!

HBO’s The Regime started out on a rough note on Sunday — and that note came right out of star Kate Winslet’s mouth.

Winslet stars in the new political satire as Elena, the chancellor of a fictional European country whose merciless rule has everyone bending over backwards to keep her happy. That included politely smiling and nodding along as Elena took the mic and mangled the classic Chicago tune “If You Leave Me Now” at a ritzy fundraiser. Elena’s rendition was spectacularly bad… but it didn’t start out that way.

“Can I just say it’s a really difficult song to sing?” Winslet told reporters during a recent press conference. “It’s just so tricky. But I had practiced, and the kids were getting sick of me practicing, and I sort of thought, ‘OK, I can sing it fairly well, and with a certain degree of confidence… I’ll just give it a go.” She went into the studio to record it, and after a few takes, director Stephen Frears stopped her, she recalls: “He said, ‘I just don’t understand. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Why is she singing it well?’”

Frears then suggested that she should “’do it badly,’” Winslet remembers. “And I thought, ‘Oh my god, that is brilliant.’ Because then of course, in that moment, as an audience, you know you are allowed to laugh. And it sets the tone for the entire show.”

Frears reveals that there was a real-life inspiration for Elena’s dreadful performance: “If you look on YouTube under [Russian president Vladimir] Putin, there’s a moment when he sings ‘Blueberry Hill.’ And various Hollywood actors applaud him, and [Gerard] Depardieu is there. I mean, it’s just breathtaking. And he doesn’t sing it as well as Fats Domino.”

Not everyone was pretending to like Elena’s singing, though, showrunner Will Tracy points out. Her new bodyguard Zubak, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, earnestly enjoyed her performance, he says: “If you look at Zubak’s face when we hang on him, it’s actually during the period where she’s sort of singing the worst, [but] he’s quite entranced by it. I don’t think he hears a bum note in there. I think he thinks she’s an angel.”

You might not like Elena’s singing, but how’d you like The Regime’s premiere? Give it a grade in our poll, and then hit the comments below to let us know if you’ll keep watching.