From ‘Mare of Easttown’ to ‘Maid,’ Working Class Sheroes Fight for Fair Treatment

variety.com:

Whitney Friedlander As the pandemic has acutely pointed out, America runs on the working class: grocery store clerks, sanitation workers, and delivery drivers who are doing the grunt work of keeping this country afloat as they fight for a reasonable minimum wage while barely being able to afford their own housing.

Many of them are women; working-class sheroes who are stringing together paychecks and odd jobs to take care of themselves and, oftentimes, children and other relatives.These are worlds that the glitz and glamour of Hollywood often ignore but that are taking prominent places in this award season’s crop of prestige television.

SAG-nominated performances include those from programming such as Hulu’s “Dopesick,” the miniseries that gives faces to people impacted by the opioid crisis, and HBO’s “Mare of Easttown,” a story of an exhausted and beat-down small-town cop surrounded by her equally exhausted and beat-down friends and family, and “Maid,” creator Molly Smith Metzler’s Netflix series inspired by Stephanie Land’s memoir of cleaning houses as a single mother as she attempts to extricate herself from an abusive relationship. “People in Alex’s position don’t have don’t have time to have a thing that is their own, often, because of the way that the work system basically enslaves people,” “Maid” star Margaret Qualley says of her lead character, a mother to a young girl and an aspiring writer and who oftentimes has just dollars to her name.Unless the scene called for it, Qualley forwent makeup for the role and frequently braided her own hair because the time it would take for personal grooming would be a luxury Alex wouldn’t have.