Kate Winslet Once Called out the Actor Who Tried to Sabotage Her ‘Titanic’ Audition
Actor Kate Winslet clinched the role of a lifetime after being cast in James Cameron’s Titanic.
But before being paired with Leonardo DiCaprio, there was another potential love interest she screened with that tried to interfere with her audition.
Kate Winslet didn’t have to audition anymore after ‘Titanic’
Titanic marked a significant shift in both the actor’s life and career. On one hand, Winslet dealt with a level of attention that she sometimes found overwhelming. On the other hand, the star-power she acquired from Titanic opened more lucrative opportunities. The actor soon found she didn’t even have to audition anymore for her roles.
While avoiding auditions may have made it easier to be cast in certain films, Winslet thought the screening process still had its benefits.
“I miss that—the adrenaline of wanting something that much when you go into a room for something. That’s a really important part of a young actor’s life, because you learn your adrenaline levels, you learn how to calm your whole nervous system down,” she once told Backstage.
Winslet believed that auditioning could also help boost an actor’s self-confidence and growth.
“And the process helps enormously in terms of becoming unselfconscious—being able to walk onto a film set and not have that devil on your shoulder going, ‘They think you’re s***. You shouldn’t be here.’ It takes a lot to get through those feelings and move beyond them, and the audition process is helpful in that,” she explained.
Kate Winslet called out the actor who tried to mess up her ‘Titanic’ audition
Winslet screened with a couple of other actors to test her chemistry with potential love interests. Although there were several male actors vying for Leonardo DiCaprio’s role of Jack Dawson, Winslet was only able to recall a few she rehearsed with. One of them was Matthew McConaughey, who gave Winslet a fantastic experience. But there was another actor who she didn’t have such high praises for. She couldn’t remember the performer by name, although she wondered if it could’ve been actor Jeremy Sisto.
“He, whoever it was, very much wanted to let me know that he had been there doing this auditioning thing the whole of the day before,” she said in an interview with Josh Horowitz. “And absolutely threw out a couple of names of people who he had been auditioning with in camera. That he was completely trying to f*** me up. And I was like, ‘mmhmm, yeah, mmhm.’”
The Oscar-winner ended up having the last laugh in the encounter, while also learning a lesson in humility.
“I just took from that, ‘Wow, I’ll never do that to another actor. I will never, ever do that to another actor.’ What is the point? But I also thought, ‘You’re not gonna get this part.’ I could just tell,” she recalled . “He was just way too pleased with himself. And Jim Cameron, I can sense was not a person who was going to be very tolerant to any young actor who had any degree of arrogance.”
Kate Winslet can’t stand watching her ‘Titanic’ performance
Winslet confided that she’s one of many actors who doesn’t like to watch themselves on screen.
“It sounds terribly self-indulgent, but actors do, I think, tend to be pretty self-critical, and I have a very hard time watching myself anyway,” she once told CNN.
This is especially true on Titanic, where she revealed she can’t watch the feature without wanting to modify her own acting.
“I’m like, ‘Ugh, really? Really? You did it like that? Oh my god,'” Winslet said. “And even my American accent, I look at it and I’m like, ‘Ugh, I can’t even listen to myself.’ It’s awful, hopefully it’s so much better now.”
