Kate Winslet Once Shared That She’s Drawn to Movie Roles She’s Freaked out by
Kate Winslet has starred in a variety of different film roles, from Titanic to The Holiday. But when she’s offered movies she feels like she can’t do, it typically motivates the actor even more.
Kate Winslet felt her film roles got better as she aged
Winslet is known for starring in critically acclaimed features. But as she’s matured over the years, she’s noticed a slight shift in the roles she’s been offered. However, it’s a shift that has worked in favor of the actor’s interests.
“As I get older, my roles are getting more and more interesting. And I cannot believe that,” she said in a 2009 interview with The New York Times. “I mean, I have been so blessed. But the last two, three years in particular, since really 2005, it’s just been utterly incredible. And it is me that chooses.”
Winslet also credited her intuition for helping her pick out the intriguing roles she’s been offered. And it’s an intuition that hasn’t steered her wrong yet.
“I sometimes go for something that will surprise my agents. And they go, ‘Really, wow. Ok. We didn’t think you were gonna go for that one.’ But I just really trust my instinct,” she said. “And sometimes it’s literally just a knee-jerk reaction.”
Kate Winslet once shared that she’s drawn to movie roles she’s freaked out by
Some of the more interesting roles Winslet has found herself starring in were The Reader and Revolutionary Road. The challenges those two films presented played a significant part in Winslet doing the films. Winslet felt she had a huge responsibility to do her roles justice, especially when it came to her Revolutionary Road character April.
“I mean, with April, the pressure to get it right, I did feel this huge enormous pressure because it was so important to me. But when the chips are down, you just have to push the demons aside and just say, ‘No, I’m here. And I will do this the way I believe it should be done,'” Winslet said.
With her Reader character, Hannah, Winslet found herself in a situation where she had nothing in common with her role. Which was a detriment Winslet had to work around.
“[With] Hannah I was very much playing a character, and I remember staring down the barrel of the gun and thinking, ‘S***. I really have nothing I can relate to here. There’s nothing of my own experience I can put into this character, at all. So let’s just start right there and hope for the goddamn best,'” Winslet once said in an interview with HuffPost.
However, both Revolutionary Road and The Reader shared a level of difficulty that Winslet enjoyed to see in her potential films.
“If I’m freaked out by it and think I could never do that, that makes me think I should be doing it,” Winslet once told Star Tribune. “I felt that way for both of these films. Playing these two incredibly strong characters has been the most creatively rewarding year of my life, taught me more and stretched me more than ever before.”
The movie role Kate Winslet felt marked a turning point in her career
Winslet has had many notable roles in her long career. She burst into the scene in the Peter Jackson film Heavenly Creatures, and became a megastar overnight with Titanic. But Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was a particular highlight in her career. The 2004 romance film saw Winslet take on a different kind of role than she’d been accustomed to.
“I think Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, that almost marked quite a big turning point I think in my career because I played an American character in that film. And I, before that, had played a lot of English roles in sort of more classical period stories. So this, for me, did sort of change all of that and opened a lot of other doors,” she once said in an interview with Movie Zine.
