Will Chase
A fisherman's hands, a cop's jaw, and a marriage held together by silence.
Will Chase is a rough-edged, small-town detective at the Easttown Police Department who is thrust into the central murder investigation alongside the show's protagonist, Mare Sheehan. Played by Jack Huston, he embodies the kind of working-class, blue-collar cop who speaks in blunt, unpolished sentences and measures the world through the lens of a fishing rod and a six-pack. He is not the intellectual center of the case, but his grounded, physical presence and complicated domestic life give the series its counterweight to Mare's relentless, solitary drive.
From a behind-the-scenes perspective, Will Chase represents one of the show's key casting and tonal choices: a character who could easily have been written as a comic relief sidekick but was instead given genuine emotional fractures, marital tension, and a quiet dignity that complicates his bluster. The production leaned into his physicality—his hands, his posture, his way of occupying space in a cramped police station—to make him feel like a man who has spent decades in small-town Pennsylvania.
Quick Facts
- Portrayed by
- Jack Huston
- Role
- Detective, Easttown Police Department
- Affiliation
- Easttown PD
- Setting
- Easttown, Pennsylvania (fictional small town)
- Series
- Mare of Easttown (HBO, 2021)
- Creator
- Brad Ingelsby
Lore & Background
Will Chase moves through Easttown the way a man moves through a tackle shop: purposefully, a little gruffly, and with the expectation that the world will hand him a problem he can fix with his bare hands. He is a local, a product of the same small-town ecosystem that shapes everyone in the series, and his detective work is less about forensic elegance and more about knocking on doors, driving the same stretch of road, and trusting his gut. He and Mare Sheehan form an uneasy professional partnership; where she is methodical and inward, he is loud, physical, and prone to saying the thing no one else in the station will say out loud.
His personal life is a constant undercurrent. His marriage is strained, his home is a site of low-level conflict, and his children exist in a world where his job keeps pulling him away. The show never treats his domestic struggles as mere backdrop; they bleed into his professional decisions, his patience, his willingness to stay late at the station or call it a night. He is a man trying to be a good husband, a good father, and a good cop in a town where those three roles collide every single day.
What makes Will Chase resonate with audiences is his refusal to be a monolith. He can be crude, dismissive, and frustratingly blunt, yet in the same breath he can show a tenderness that surprises even him. He is not the hero of the investigation, but he is its conscience in the most unglamorous, human way possible—a man who shows up to work in a flannel shirt and stays because someone has to.
Reader's Guide
Casting Will Chase was one of the deliberate tonal decisions in the production. Rather than selecting a character-actor type who would play the rough cop as a bit, the creative team looked for a performer who could carry physical weight and emotional restraint simultaneously. Jack Huston brought a natural stillness and a working-class cadence that made the role feel lived-in rather than performed. In interviews surrounding the series, the emphasis was on making the Easttown PD feel like a real, under-resourced department—small rooms, shared desks, fluorescent lighting—so that the two detectives' dynamic would read as genuine friction rather than scripted banter.
On set, the production leaned heavily on natural light and practical locations in Pennsylvania to ground the small-town texture. Scenes involving Will Chase often used wider, more static framing to let his body language—how he stands in a doorway, how he handles a file folder, how he sits in his truck—carry the emotional information without dialogue. The fishing sequences were shot to feel like routine, not spectacle: the same river, the same bench, the same quiet repetition that a real fisherman would recognize.
The creator's stated intent was to avoid making any of the supporting characters into mere functions for the protagonist. Will Chase's marital scenes were written and directed to sit at the same narrative weight as the investigation, ensuring his home life was not a subplot but a parallel thread of the same story.
More in Behind the Scenes
Elsewhere in Mare of Easttown
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