Kate Winslet thinks her younger self would have appreciated a newer resource that’s readily available to actors on sets today: intimacy coordinators.
“I would have benefited from an intimacy coordinator every single time I had to do a love scene or be partially naked or even a kissing scene,” the Oscar winner told The New York Times in an interview published on Sunday.
“It would have been nice to have had someone in my corner, because I always had to stand up for myself,” she said.
Intimacy coordinators, who began appearing in Hollywood around 2017, help guide actors and enforce certain standards during intimate scenes to ensure that all parties feel comfortable and can voice possible concerns.
In her Times interview, Winslet listed off things she wished she had said in some of her previous roles, like “I don’t like that camera angle. I don’t want to stand here full-frontal nude. I don’t want this many people in the room. I want my dressing gown to be closer.”
“Just little things like that,” she continued. “When you’re young, you’re so afraid of pissing people off or coming across as rude or pathetic because you might need those things. So learning to have a voice for oneself in those environments was very, very hard.”
Luckily, Winslet feels that conditions both in Hollywood and within the public sphere are getting better for young actors, especially women, these days.
“Young actresses now — fuck me — they are unafraid. It makes me so proud,” the “Mare of Easttown” actor told Vogue last year.
“And I think, Yes, all the shit flinging, all the struggle, all the using my voice for years, often being finger-pointed at and laughed at — I don’t give a shit! It was all bloody worth it,” Winslet said. “Because the culture is changing in the way that I couldn’t in my wildest dreams have imagined in my 20s.”