Evan Peters drank 'lil Dixie cups of apple cider vinegar' every half hour to act drunk in 'Mare of Easttown'
- Evan Peters drank apple cider vinegar every half hour to act drunk in "Mare of Easttown."
- Director Craig Zobel revealed the secret behind Peters' drunk acting to a fan on Twitter.
- Kate Winslet, Peters' "Mare of Easttown" costar, said he also ate hoagies while filming the series.
Evan Peters has an unusual trick for realistically acting inebriated: drinking apple cider vinegar, which apparently helps him activate "sense memories" of being drunk, according to the "Mare of Easttown" director.
Peters is currently starring as Detective Colin Zabel in HBO's new limited series, in which his character tries to solve the murder of a teenage girl alongside Detective Mare Sheehan (played by Kate Winslet) in a small town in Pennsylvania.
In a particularly memorable scene from the third episode, which aired on May 2, Colin and Mare's paths cross at a bar where Colin proceeds to tell her about one of his past relationships in a drunken stupor.
Fans of the show took to social media to praise Peters for giving a "masterclass in drunk acting."
Another said it was "some of the best drunk acting" they had seen "in a long time."
When a "Mare of Easttown" viewer praised Peters as "the most convincing drunk in a show that I've EVER seen" on Twitter and asked if the actor was actually drunk during the shoot, director Craig Zobel responded that Peters was sober when they filmed the interaction between him and Winslet's character on the show.
"[Peters was] Sober, but drinking lil Dixie cups of apple cider vinegar every half hour or so from the on-set props master, to trigger sense memories," Zobel explained.
Zobel also revealed that Peters came up with a funny line from that scene, about his detective character's reaction to an ex-girlfriend breaking up with him during breakfast.
"'Let me [put] down my bagel,' was an idea Evan had the night before and had me howling and crying in rehearsals, and I insisted we keep," Zobel wrote.
Peters also ate convenience-store hoagies during the shoot
Aside from using apple cider vinegar to pull off his Twitter-acclaimed performance of a drunk man, Winslet separately revealed that Peters developed a taste for hoagies from the east coast convenience-store chain Wawa while shooting "Mare of Easttown."
"He would say, 'Ugh, you gotta try the Gobbler," Winslet told The Envelope Podcast in an interview published Wednesday. "And it was this gigantic sub, basically - or hoagie, this huge hoagie."
"It's basically a Thanksgiving meal in a hoagie," Winslet continued about the enormous sandwich from Wawa. "He was like, 'Oh, yeah, I just eat that thing and I pass out.' And I'd be like, 'I'm not surprised! I'm not surprised, Evan!'"
"Mare of Easttown" is airing Sundays at 10 p.m. ET on HBO.