It wasn’t the sex scandal that drew Kate Mara to ‘A Teacher.’ It was ‘the aftermath’

Hello! I’m Yvonne Villarreal and welcome to the newsletter companion to “The Envelope: The Podcast,” where my cohost, Mark Olsen, and I bring you highlights from each week’s episode.

We may be on the longest road to the Oscars on record, but we’re nearly there! Just stay hydrated.

The SAG Awards’ prerecorded ceremony aired Sunday night, and as a typically reliable predictor of the major races at the Oscars, SAG added some intrigue to movies’ biggest night.

For the first time, all four individual movie honors went to actors of color. The late Chadwick Boseman won as lead actor for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” while Viola Davis took home the lead actress statuette for her performance in the same film. Meanwhile, Daniel Kaluuya won as supporting actor for “Judas and the Black Messiah” and Yuh-Jung Youn was the supporting actress winner for “Minari.”

Breaking down the SAG winners, our trusty awards specialist Glenn Whipp took a closer look at how things might unfold at the Academy Awards on April 25. And the ensemble win for “The Trial of the Chicago 7” doesn’t have him entirely convinced the courtroom drama will snag gold in the Oscar best picture race.

As Glenn wrote: “‘Chicago 7’ and ‘Minari’ were the only two of SAG’s ensemble nominees even in the best picture race. Oscar front-runner ‘Nomadland’ was absent because its cast was populated mostly by nonprofessional actors, and guild voters aren’t going to reward that. The ensemble omission used to be a big deal until recent years, when ‘The Shape of Water’ and ‘Green Book’ won the best picture Oscar without a SAG cast nomination. So ‘Nomadland’ partisans have little cause for concern.”

On this week’s episode of the podcast, we’re taking a slight breather from all the Oscars talk — but only slight! (We couldn’t deprive you of Glenn’s thoughts on the promise made by Steven Soderbergh, who is one of the producers of this year’s telecast, that the opening minute of the ceremony “is going to make your knees buckle.”

It’s 2021, haven’t we gone through enough?

To help brace your knees for that occasion, we’re offering some alternate programming in the runup to the Oscars: I interview actor Kate Mara about her latest TV turn, in FX’s “A Teacher.”

An expansion of Hannah Fidell’s 2013 film of the same name, the provocative half-hour drama explores the relationship between a high school senior (Nick Robinson) and his English teacher, Claire (Kate Mara). Just as it follows their attraction develop and escalate, it also chronicles the consequences when it intensifies and combusts. It’s a strikingly different portrait of the teacher-student “affair” typically depicted on television.

“We could name a bunch of shows that dealt with the actual [teacher-student] relationship,” Mara says. “Maybe an episode here or there that dealt with the actual relationship of it — and obviously, that part of the story is important. But [Hannah] really wanted to make sure we were telling a story that hadn’t been told before and she realized and recognized that the aftermath, and focusing on consequences of the choices that you make — that sort of thing hadn’t really been explored as often. That was a really important part of it for me.”

The final episode jumps ahead 10 years. Claire has a new husband and two kids, while Eric is a wilderness counselor for troubled youth. By coincidence, they find themselves back in Austin, Texas — if you haven’t watched the series, we’ll leave it at that. For Mara, it was an intriguing element of the story to catch up with her character at a different stage in her life.

“It was really interesting for us to explore: Well, is she really able to find love again?” Mara says. “And is she able to find someone who can get past what she’s done and who feels safe enough to have children with her? Do other parents think of her? Is she able to live a relatively normal life? Is she able to get a job? I did find it really, really fascinating and just an interesting character study: Has she come to terms with the choices that she’s made or is she still telling herself all of these lies in order to survive in her own world, in her own guilt?”

Thanks for reading/listening/subscribing. We have lots more conversations to come, including talks with Amanda Seyfried for “Mank,” Emerald Fennell for “Promising Young Woman” and Cynthia Erivo for “Genius: Aretha.”

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