Kate Winslet couldn’t help but slip back into “overshare” mode during a recent appearance on Graham Norton’s talk show.
During her interview last week, Kate spoke candidly about the realities of filming a scene in the film Holy Smoke, which required her character to strip off and urinate, in a bid to prove she’d been “deprogrammed” after falling in with a guru during her travels in India.
“My character tries to convince him that it’s all working, and so she takes all of her clothes off and walks towards him in the desert saying, ‘look, it’s worked, I’m free’,” Kate recalled. “And she’s just pissing and pissing.
“And I thought ‘how am I really going to do that, then? Am I really going to have to do a wee on camera?’. And Jane Campion, the director, said to me, ‘well it would be nice, you know? You could try, darling’. And I’m thinking, ‘no, I don’t want to do that, that sounds really horrible’.”
Instead, Kate was fitted with a “wee rig, that was attached to the back of my hair by a little piece of fishing wire”.
“There was a bag of saline drip fluid that they’d sort of dyed,” the Titanic star continued.
“I had to get this little pipe and wedge it in, you know, a specific spot. I insisted that would be my own job – someone did offer, but I said, ‘it’s fine, I think I’ve got this’.
“So I had to wedge this tube right in the coochie, and then at a certain point they’d quickly cut, and a makeup artist would run in and release this fluid, and then it would just gush.”
However, Kate’s woes didn’t end there. Far from it, in fact.
She noted: “The problem is, when you’re a girl, it doesn’t go in a stream down the middle. It goes all down the leg, and no paper! So this was not a good shot!
“So the number of times I had to do this flipping thing just to get the wee to hit the floor. I’m like, ‘I’m not a guy!’. So there you go.”
Kate interrupted her own story to question, “why do I tell these stories?”, referencing her last visit to Graham’s famous red sofa, in which she shared another “horrific” story about her bodily functions.
Her latest anecdote also prompted fellow guest Cate Blanchett to admit she’s keen to try a “Shewee”, which inspired an enthusiastic reaction from Kate.
“Someone gave me a Shewee and it’s brilliant! I used it at Glastonbury last year!” she declared, explaining: “It’s a cup with a little tube and it means you can stand up and have a wee – and you can direct the flow.”
There you have it folks. Kate Winslet. Her “wee rig”. And her “Shewee”.
Elsewhere in the interview, Kate dismissed speculation that the character she plays in the new political drama The Regime was inspired by a certain former British leader.