Kate Winslet is currently promoting The Regime and Lee, a film which should come out later this year. The Regime is the HBO dark-comedy/satire of an oppressive European dictator, where Kate plays the dictator. It looks like yet another brilliant turn for Kate on the small screen, following her massively successful HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce and Mare of Easttown. For her promotion, Kate recently spoke to the New York Times Magazine about life, love and Ozempic. She’s not on Ozempic, and before she was asked about it in this interview, she had no idea what it was. Some highlights:
She had an eating disorder in the 1990s. “I never told anyone about it. Because guess what — people in the world around you go: ‘Hey, you look great! You lost weight!’” For that last bit, Winslet slipped into a pitch-perfect American accent — Los Angeles, maybe a film executive. “So even the compliment about looking good is connected to weight. And that is one thing I will not let people talk about. If they do, I pull them up straight away.”
On what she thinks of Ozempic: “I actually don’t know what Ozempic is. All I know is that it’s some pill that people are taking or something like that.” I told her that Ozempic — which apparently has not yet saturated English culture as it has in the United States — was a very in-demand diabetes drug now commonly taken off-label for weight loss. “But what is it?” Winslet said, her mouth full of pastry. I went on: It was a shot people took that dampened their interest in food. Winslet looked appalled… “Oh, my God. This sounds terrible. Let’s eat some more things!” She made a show of eating more of her pastry, crumbs tumbling onto the blankets.
On 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. It would have been nice to have had someone in my corner, because I always had to stand up for myself.” And often, she didn’t — she felt that whatever was being asked of her was simply part of the job. She has a litany of unspoken objections she wished she had felt empowered to make: “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. 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.”
She never wanted to be known as a complainer: “I was already experiencing huge amounts of judgment, persecution, all this bullying. People can call me fat. They can call me what they want. But they certainly cannot say that I complained and I behaved badly. Over my dead body. I would not have known how to do that without people in power turning around and saying, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, you know, her again, that complainer.’ I would rather suffer in silence than ever let that happen to me, even still today.”
Accessing her emotions on screen: “In the beginning, I would rummage around my emotional toolbox and pull out something that had actually happened to me. But that stopped working for me at a certain point. I don’t know why. As you get older, you live more life; you have more real experiences that you add to the emotional toolbox without realizing that you’re doing it. And so sometimes, as you get older, quite honestly, emotions are easier to access because they just simmer below the surface all the time — because there’s just so damn many of them.”
I’m not judging Kate’s reaction to the Ozempic stuff because I doubt she understands that Ozempic is supposed to be used for obesity and diabetes, not garden variety weight loss. Plus, it’s kind of clear that Kate still has a somewhat skewed relationship with how she talks about her body, food and weight. I don’t blame her for that either – the way she was treated when she was younger was traumatizing for her, and the things people said about her weight were cruel and toxic. All of it left a mark and, besides that, she’s damned if she does, damned if she doesn’t. Also, to all of the younger women out there: don’t be afraid to complain, to take up space, to point out when things are not right. There’s also a huge difference between “standing up for yourself and your needs” and “complaining.” “Suffering in silence” is not something to aspire to.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, Avalon Red.