Kate Winslet is still keeping it real three decades into her career.
The Oscar-winning actor has long spoken out about her strong feelings around body image depictions on screen, and her approach to her new World War II drama Lee is no different.
In a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar about playing photojournalist Lee Miller, the Titanic actor revealed that she stopped exercising altogether so her body would look softer.
But despite this intentional character choice, Kate recalled one incident on set where she had to insist her body be portrayed authentically.
“There’s a bit where Lee’s sitting on a bench in a bikini,” she said. “And one of the crew came up between takes and said: ‘You might want to sit up straighter.’ So you can’t see my belly rolls? Not on your life!”
“It was deliberate, you know?” she added.
The Revolutionary Road star explained that she takes “pride in it because it is my life on my face, and that matters. It wouldn’t occur to me to cover that up”.
During the interview, Kate also reflected on being propelled to global fame at the age of 21, after revealing earlier this year that she’d struggled with an eating disorder.
“There was a lot of bullying of me that went on in the media, and that did get to me,” she told the magazine. “Look at all those years in my twenties when I was all sorts of different shapes and sizes.”
She added that nowadays she feels “a huge sense of relief that women are so much more accepting of themselves and refusing to be judged”.
“We waste so much time being down on ourselves and I’m just not doing it ever again,” she added.
This isn’t the first time Kate has fought for her real stomach to be kept in a scene.
Back in 2021, the actor insisted that a “bulgy bit of belly” was not edited out of a sex scene in her Emmy-winning series Mare Of Easttown.
She also rejected a retouched promotional poster, telling The New York Times: “I loved her marks and her scars and her faults and her flaws and the fact that she has no off switch, no stop button.”