Kate Winslet talks about misogyny in the movies, her strange habits during lockdown, and the unexpected joys of discovering fossils.
A man adjusts the angle of her laptop. "Hello!", he greets him. Is there a dishwasher behind him? A small wooden gizmo reading "Let's Dance" in cheerful painted letters balances on an Aga. I landed in a cozy, lighted garage, somewhere on the south coast. The nice man steps aside and, hell, there's Kate Winslet. Movie star Kate Winslet, “Hello!”, has a black jacket and tied back hair, and the famous smile of hers that gives the impression that she is trying not to laugh at a crude joke.
The man is her husband, Ned (Abel Smith, formerly known as Ned Rocknroll) and the garage is her “little barn” of hers. “It's not a particularly nice barn,” she says. Her energy is like a nice lady helping you fit your bras at Marks & Spencer. I like her right away. “But look here, can you see the wonderful sink? It's from the set of Mildred Pierce. The keys are terrible. But I always try to take some detail from all my films. I took all the curtains in the cabin on The Holiday…” Her children, Mia (20, her daughter with first husband Jim Threapleton), Joe (16, from her second marriage, to Sam Mendes, and Bear (born 2013, shortly after marrying Ned) make them smaller and smaller: "As for, mending her jeans. Also, I did a movie called All the King's Men where Jude Law and I had to do a scene where we kissed on the table, we kissed until our socks came off. It was fabulous. While it was all going on I was thinking, 'I'm going to have to buy this table.' And I did!”
If you take a memento from every movie with you, it's not surprising that you needed to build a barn. So far at 45, Winslet has worked for two-thirds of her life, bouncing between Hollywood mega-productions (Titanic in 1997), right up to receiving an Oscar (she was the first actress to receive four nominations before the age of 30, and won one for The Reader in 2008) or make a surreal and existential masterpiece (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, in 2004) or dedicate one of his Baftas (in 2016, as Best Supporting Actress in Steve Jobs) to “all the girls who doubt themselves”, recalling the time when her drama teacher at school recommended that she “settle for playing fat”
For each role, whether she's a fat girl or not, she fully immerses herself in character, and even puts on a few pounds. Her darkness, her glamour, her anxiety, her breath. While she was learning to freedive for Avatar 2, she held her breath underwater for seven minutes and 14 seconds, breaking Tom Cruise's film record. "God is wonderful. Your mind is completely wrecked. You can't think about anything, you can't make lists in your head, you just look at the bubbles below you. It is dangerous? "Oh yeah. There has to be someone next to you. Ned trained with me and also became very good at holding his breath. But he does…passes out.” What were his first words when he emerged after seven minutes? “And 14 seconds! My first words were: 'Am I dead?' Yes, I thought she was dead!” she smiles happily.
Though Dorset isn't dead yet, the lengths to which she took the lead in preparing for her new film (and possible nomination) were similarly extreme. In Ammonite, a low-key, crushing film, writer-director Francis Lee introduces Mary Anning, a 19th-century paleontologist whose important fossil discoveries were appropriated by the male scientific establishment. Like a fossil, Anning's heart is unearthed by Charlotte Murchinson (played by Saoirse Ronan), the grieving wife of an amateur geologist; like a stone, it breaks. Everywhere there is death and bad weather and lust, there is even urine on the roof. To "breathe like Mary," Winslet moved, alone, into a small house in Lyme Regis, "a bunker" on the beach, spending her nights drawing by chandelier light with a depressing bowl of soup, and her days on the cliffs, pulling fossils out of the stones with ancient tools while wearing heavy boots. Under the rain.
“I was nervous the first time I spoke to her,” Francis Lee said, by phone from his snowy Yorkshire home. “I knew that a star of this size would bring a lot of spotlight to history. I became obsessed with elevating Mary to a position she didn't reach when she was alive, but to me, the work of a play is important. So I cautiously started talking about the preparation, the research, the manual labor, and Winslet (so he calls it, very fondly) just calmly replied, 'That's what I do.'" She laughs. I should have known. "Her work of hers always carries a grain of truth."
She spent weeks on the rocks, digging up fossils. Of these, she polished one and gave it to Ronan as a gift. She learned to walk differently. She took drawing classes. She cultivated a kind of moist temperance. one day on set, Lee saw a stranger hanging around. She got irritated, who was that woman bouncing all over the place? A team member had to tell him quietly that it was Winslet. “I had to meet her again as Kate! She transforms. And can I say this? Yes I will, I think it's one of the best things I've ever seen him do. You know, she has no vanity, the only time she ever talked about lights and angles was to say, 'Can you guys see my double chin?'"
Looking at Winslet today, gentle and gorgeous in the warmth of her Aga as she remembers Mary, the jumble of the cliffs, and the weeks it took her to get the dirt off her fingernails, I casually mention Winslet's method acting. she. Her face twists with concern. "I hate that word. When I was married as Sam (Mendes), he used to tease me with her, 'You're a method. I have an allergic reaction to the pretentious 'process', so I'd hate to admit that maybe I actually have one of my own. But my dad always told me, 'You're only as good as your last job, honey.'"
She has intentionally drifted, always positive. “Do you remember that time in history when all of a sudden, tennis players became extraordinarily vocal and much more muscular than before? Well, suddenly I felt that that happens now in the world of acting. Partly because we are coming out of the spectacular #MeToo period, but also because women are discovering an inherent sense of connection with other women. We are less afraid to say what we think,” Winslet continues. Has it been contained in the past? She sighs. "Yes a bit".
Reading about Winslet's many years of press, in this perfect, enlightened age, it was a shock to see how often her body was part of the story. Joan Rivers once said about her role in Titanic: "If she weighed two kilos less, Leo would have fit on the boat." “Yes, at 20, people were talking too much about my weight. And they talked to me to comment on my own physique. Well, then I've earned the label of defiant and confrontational. But no, I just defended myself.
She recently revisited some articles written about her in the late 1990s, when she was 19 years old. “And it was almost funny how shocking, critical and cruel the tabloids were to me. I kept finding out who she really was! They made comments about my size, calculated my weight, even printed the supposed diet I was on. It was judgmental and horrible and I was disappointed to read it. But but? “But she also made me feel so…so touched. Because of how different it is now."
Because she grew up in the world of movies, Winslet has a particular sympathy for women who seek her way, Ronan says in an email she sent me from the set of another movie. "Kate is incredibly supportive of young actors," he writes, "and it's one of the things I love about her." Winslet's daughter Mia launched her own acting career last year, at a similar age as her mother.
How did her comments about her physique impact the teenage Winslet? “My confidence was damaged. She didn't want to go to Hollywood because she remembered thinking, 'God, if they tell me this in England, then what will happen there?' It also messes with your changing impression of what is beautiful, you know? I didn't feel it much. For the simple reason that nothing can really prepare you for…it. But of course, I had Mia at 25 years old. And all that shit she just…” she mimics a wave with her hand, “it evaporated”.
Winslet and her children have had the company of their father, also an actor, during the confinement. Her mother, a caretaker, passed away in 2017. Her death prompted Winslet to investigate her family tree, discovering that her ancestors were "starving slaves in Sweden." Surely one day there will be a movie.
At first, Winslet enjoyed the confinement. He managed to sleep well for the first time in months. But as the weeks passed, his patience also wore thin. She is now “obsessed with sweeping the kitchen. I have a huge fixation on it. Why am I the only person doing it? Why am I in four points again? However, she now has vivid dreams. “Last night I dreamed that I was getting the vaccine. But the person did not do it properly. So they took out the syringe, but half of the liquid began to spread everywhere. And I thought, 'Well, what do we do now?'"
She is well aware that while we are all in this together, some people are closer than others. His house is big, his family is safe, the only person close to him who has died was Ned's 96-year-old grandmother (she was also the mother of Richard Branson) whom Winslet reportedly rescued on one occasion from a fire in Necker Island. She feels lucky, both with her life and her career. “So haphazard. The things I have learned are not only about the art of acting, but also about how to think. For example, with Ammonite I realized how movies eternally objectify women, we do it like breathing. The sense of equality working at Ammonite was so amazing to me,” she smiles, “we took away the heteros-xual stereotypes.”
As Lee developed Ammonite, combining everything he knew about Mary Anning's life (in 1811, at the age of 12, she discovered an Ichthyosaurus skeleton) with what he imagined (an affair with another woman), it ignited the controversies. He responded elegantly in a series of tweets. "After seeing how queer history is routinely heteros-xualized across the culture, and given that this is a historical figure who has no evidence of a heteros-xual relationship, isn't it permissible to look at this person in another context?" he wrote he. "Particularly a woman whose work and life are subjected to the worst aspects of patriarchy, class and gender discrimination are thrown out of balance."
Playing Mary (and meeting Lee) clearly had a profound effect on Winslet, beyond the physical demands and work of her. “She made me feel like I had to hold myself accountable for the times I was complicit in my own objectification in movies. The things I agreed to do. Body positions, or the way I was lit or the clothes I wore."
She pauses cautiously. “I mean, you didn't ask me, but I choose to discuss it because we're talking about the objectification of women. But I've been asked so, so many times about the intim-te scenes in Ammonite, far more than I've been asked about any heteros-xual love scene. When they have, they are comparisons, how was Leo compared to Jude? So embarrassing, so vulgar. But what happens with the discussion of LGBTQ love scenes is that people actually use different words to describe them." “Attractive”, said The Sun, “Playful”, said The Metro. 90% of the press coverage of Ammonite focused on the s-x: how Winslet described the situation with Ronan as “definitely different from eating a sandwich”, or how her decision to move their “playful s-x scene” to her 25th birthday Ronan was "the best gift he could have wished for." “'Highly erotic,'” Winslet continues, “'Exciting,' things that describe the impact the scene can have on the audience, rather than the content of the scene itself. It really makes me angry. What I love about how Francis chose to tell the story of Mary Anning, and her connection to Charlotte, is that he did it without hesitation. The relationship is part of the story. It has nothing to do with fear, or secrets. It's about two people falling in love."
When Helen Mirren interviewed Francis Lee about Ammonite (so was the noise that surrounded her, Mirren at home fully costumed, gushing on camera, and the director about to release his second film), she admitted that she thought she was woman. "Only a woman could understand that," she told him. “That pleases me,” he said. “And me,” Winslet said.
Anning's character, as she realized after first meeting him, was made out of Lee. “This film made me much more determined to tell the lives of historical and significant women. Susan Sarandon and I had this conversation once, about how, because men can get financing for their movies, and with bigger budgets than girls, as a woman you have to ask for favors from the great creative allies you've made in your lifetime, whether they're costume designers, or storyboard artists, and ask them to do something for a little less in return. It made me passionate about having a decent budget to tell your story in the same way as your male counterparts. Although many things have changed, that still does not improve.
It's not entirely true to say that this movie radicalized her, though Winslet does sound like her political views have changed since 2000, when she declared herself "irradiated by feminism." Something changed for her in 2017, at a press conference where she was promoting Wonder Wheel, a film she made with Woody Allen. "I realized that I felt bad." She leaned forward. "I shouldn't have worked with Woody, or Roman (Polanski), and I'll probably always wrestle with those regrets." She shakes her head. “Now it is incredible to me that these men have been so praised in this industry, and for so long. I challenge anyone in the acting community to turn down roles in their movies. And that's just changing."
Has anyone in the industry reacted badly to her displays of regret? “I've only said it out loud a couple of times. But yes, they have. There will always be someone who says, 'Well, you made the movie, so...' but we have to be able to change, right? We have to move on. Attempt". She lifts her chin up as if she's braving the elements, instead of Ned's small laptop screen and a floor that just doesn't want to get clean.
This expression is familiar. One of the first scenes Winslet filmed with Lee shows her looking up. We are on the roof with Mary, the sea looks angry. She watches something on the side of the cliff and, as she prepares to climb, she ties her skirt into a waistband before climbing onto the 200-million-year-old wall. As she stretches, she grabs onto a rock, her foot slips, she falls and slides painfully onto the beach. Rocks fall with her, and breaking in two after colliding in front of her feet, an ammonite appears.
