Stepping into Character’s Shoes with Kate Winslet
Recently, English award-winning actress Kate Winslet, who is loved by fans all over the world, was interviewed by Vanity Fair in a “wonderfully frank, free-roaming conversation” with Julie Miller, the magazine’s senior feature writer. The interview covered practically everything about Winslet, her family, her work through the decades, previous work experience with problematic filmmakers, acting during the pandemic, going back to the basics when taking on a new character, and looking out for actors playing LGBTQIA+ characters.
Kate Winslet is cast as the main character, portraying real-life paleontologist Mary Anning in the upcoming movie “Ammonite”. The movie is directed by Francis Lee and just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last Friday on September 11th, 2020. The movie is set to be released nationwide in the USA on November 13th, 2020. While talking about the upcoming dynamite of a film, Winslet called working alongside Saoirse Ronan for the movie as “one of the most joyful experiences of my career”.
Not only is this film about an English paleontologist, fossil collector, and dealer in the Jurassic marine fossil bed in Southwest England, the woman portrayed is involved romantically with a grief-stricken young married woman. Winslet says about the romantic lesbian relationship that she wanted for Ronan and her to have the love scenes directed and managed by Winslet herself. She wanted to choreograph the lighting so that the new movie wouldn’t be all about the perfect angles to capture the small, feminine “lusted after” features of the two women.
She says that in the past, she should have wanted to walk “into the room and saying [sic], ‘Hang on. No, I don’t want to sit in the fucking window. That’s stupid, stereotypical, make-the-woman-look-good-by-the-fucking-nice-flattering-light shit. I don’t want to do that. Can we find an alternative?’” Now, the English actress is taking the reigns of direction into her control.
Winslet has been working on another production, an HBO limited series about an LGBTQIA+ character, and says that she wants to look out for the younger actresses because she “never had that. Maybe that’s why I feel it more keenly now, because that was distinctly lacking.”
Further on in the interview, VF brought up the #MeToo movement and how it has impacted her life, her career, and how she sees not just the world but her decisions and with whom she works. In response, after she exclaims, “It’s like, what the fuck was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski? It’s unbelievable to me now how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were. It’s fucking disgraceful. And I have to take responsibility for the fact that I worked with them both. I can’t turn back the clock. I’m grappling with those regrets but what do we have if we aren’t able to just be fucking truthful about all of it?”
The interview was later closed up with discussing Winslet’s friendships with past cast members including Emma Thompson, and sharing pictures of Friday night wine glasses and lunches with them.
You can read the full interview here too.
Credit: Block Publisher
