Actor Kate Winslet has said that she warns her friends to not watch Contagion, her 2011 film about a pandemic, which she hasn’t even seen in full herself.
Actor Kate Winslet has said that she hasn’t seen her 2011 pandemic drama Contagion completely, and considering how prophetic it has turned out to be, she has no plans on watching it any time soon. In fact, she’s even reprimanding her friends who come complaining to her about how triggering the film is.
Contagion, directed by Steven Soderbergh and featuring an all-star cast that includes Matt Damon, Jude Law, Bryan Cranston, Laurence Fishburne, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marion Cotillard and others, saw a resurgence in popularity earlier this year, in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
Winslet told Entertainment Weekly that when her friends complain to her about the film’s unnerving similarities to what’s happening in the real world, she tells them, “Well, don’t f---ing watch it! It will scare you!”
She added, “The story is alarmingly accurate. We did work with a remarkable team of people who would listen to the CDC, who advised on the film and gave us incredible information daily and helped design the virus and work with [screenwriter] Scott Burns on the script.” EW noted that the actor “still hasn’t seen in full and definitely won’t now, due to COVID-19.”
Earlier this year, Winslet, Damon, Fishburne and Jennifer Ehle reunited for a PSA about the coronavirus. “Wash your hands like your life depends on it,” Winslet said in her PSA. “Because right now, in particular, it just might.” Ehle stresses that the coronavirus is novel, meaning no one is immune. “Every single one of us, regardless of age or ethnicity, is at risk of getting it,” she said.
Screenwriter Scott Z Burns, who wrote the film after researching the 2003 SARS epidemic and the 2009 flu pandemic, had said in an interview to Variety, “I think to me, the scary part is, even though you may say that the mortality rate is around 1%, if 10 million people end up getting sick, that’s a lot of people who will die. Most of them, even if they’re old, some of my favourite people are over 70 years old. And we need to take care of them.”
