Kate Winslet takes chances every time she shows up for a role, and here she talks her latest in Francis Lee's period romance.
Kate Winslet takes chances every time she shows up for a role. She wasn’t chasing likability when she earned the Best Actress Oscar for playing Nazi Hannah Schmidt in “The Reader.”
“I think I’m attracted to things that are going to be a challenge and scare me and pull on something of myself that’s different from the last time,” said Winslet in our Zoom interview (above). “You’re only as good as your last gig. If I don’t keep reinventing the wheel, how can I expect people to hope for different things from me? I step out of my comfort zone.”
Back in her 20s, Winslet realized that she was “trying to get audiences to like me and the characters I was playing,” she said. “That’s fucking bullshit. You can’t do that as an actor. I want to be prepared to get offered interesting parts that run the gamut of range, that require different emotional rhythms and stages to a character. Empathy is okay to ask for, but not sympathy. Why would you sympathize with Hannah Schmidt? It’s all right to empathize and understand the things she did, but you can’t trick or manipulate your audience. All you can do is be truthful and grounded in the part.”
This time, she connected with Yorkshire filmmaker Francis Lee, who had broken out with gay love story “God’s Own Country.” His second film, “Ammonite” (Neon), is a true 1840s story a story about the working-class, self-taught paleontologist Mary Anning, who trawled Lyme Regis, the rocky Jurassic Dorset coast in West England that served as the dramatic setting for “The French Lieutenant’s Woman.”
Winslet agreed to take on this quiet, restrained, painfully lonely collector of extinct mollusks, a poor woman with scant education who “through ingenuity and skill and determination and will to survive, became one of the best paleontologists of her generation,” said Lee. His script attracted three other top actresses: “God’s Own Country” star Gemma Jones as Anning’s sour, widowed mother; and as her love interests, Fiona Shaw (“The Lady Eve”) and Saoirse Ronan (“Lady Bird”), respectively.
Winslet felt that she and her director were “cut from the same cloth,” she said. “He’s very working class, but so am I.” The reason people think she’s not is because she’s a classically trained, successful actress who speaks well, which she inherited from her mother and actress grandmother. “I’m proper working class with real socialist parents.”
Lee also trained as an actor. “So he has a tremendous understanding of actors,” said Winslet. “I felt supported right away. I knew playing Mary was going to be frightening for me; I knew it wasn’t going to come naturally. I was nervous about playing her even though I knew I wanted to be part of the challenge.”
Lee wanted Winslet to earn the movie’s few scenes with emotion. “Playing Mary, there were two emotions I wasn’t allowed to show very often,” she said. “Almost no happiness: no smiling, no sadness, no tears. Those are two emotional actors lean on a lot, emotions I’m no stranger to in my life. Learning to use anything between those two powerful emotions was very odd.”
When she did get to show what was going on inside her, “I had to earn it,” she said. “Learning how to internalize pride, happiness, sadness, joy, longing, and find ways to express those things without words and using my face was terrifying, and very unnatural.”
To repress so much inside this “unknowable figure,” Winslet relied on building Anning’s backstory. “That helped me to understand not just who she was but why she did things the way she did,” she said, from losing her father to her tricky relationship with her mother. “When she formed a closeness with someone, it would get to the point where all she would know how to do was to keep that person in a private, isolated world to herself. For me, it’s a film about how we choose to love and how that ends up defining who we are.”
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