Entertainment
All the times Kate Winslet was real about sex scenes as she refuses to filter her body
If there’s one thing we can always rely on Kate Winslet for, it’s her pure honesty about getting down and dirty in sex scenes.
The Oscar-winning actress has revealed how she refused to let the Mare of Easttown director edit out a ‘bulgy bit of belly’ during her sex scene with Guy Pearce in the critically acclaimed HBO crime drama.
It’s just one of the many reasons why Kate is a screen icon – there aren’t too many actresses who would be willing to go unfiltered during the most intimate of scenes they could film.
However, Kate is all about keeping it real.
She’s been captured in the act several times throughout her career, with films including Titanic, Revolutionary Road and Ammonite.
As she proves yet again why she’s relatable, here’s a look back at all the times Kate was honest about on-screen sex.
Ammonite sex scenes
Kate, 45, starred alongside Saoirse Ronan as paleontologist Mary Anning, who falls passionately in love with geologist Charlotte Murchison (Ronan), before being faced with the idea that they might have to live their lives apart.
As expected, a big deal was made about their same-sex love scenes and it wasn’t lost on Kate.
Speaking to Digital Spy in March 2021, the actress said: ‘What I definitely found really striking is that people seem to talk about the love scenes in the film in ways that are much more focused, because it’s two women.
‘And I’m telling you, with my hand on my heart, I have never been asked the same volume of questions about love scenes of a heterosexual nature – of which I have shot many in my life. And so that to me, that to me, that’s a conversation.’
In August 2020, Kate also admitted that filming sex scenes are ‘definitely not lie eating a sandwich’.
She told The Hollywood Reporter: ‘I just think Saoirse and I, we just felt really safe. Francis was naturally very nervous. And I just said to him, “Listen, let us work it out”. And we did.
‘“We’ll start here. We’ll do this with the kissing, boobs, you go down there, then you do this, then you climb up here”. I mean, we marked out the beats of the scene so that we were anchored in something that just supported the narrative. I felt the proudest I’ve ever felt doing a love scene on Ammonite. And I felt by far the least self-conscious.’
On ‘intimacy coordinators’
Kate shared her thoughts on the use of intimacy coordinators in modern Hollywood, something which wasn’t available when she was a young star.
Speaking to Samira Ahmed on the How I Found My Voice podcast in February 2021, she said: ‘I definitely wish I had them in the past. I could have done with that friend.
‘You could just do with someone saying, “Can you ask him not to put his hand there”, so it wasn’t me having to say, “Can you not put your hand there”, which can be pretty awkward.
‘It might have made a difference to me over the years.’
The Reader sex scenes
The Reader, released in 2008, follows teenager Michael who falls in love with an older woman named Hanna (Winslet), but their liaison ends when she suddenly vanishes.
Of course, Kate has her fair share of sex scenes in the romantic drama and said at the time that she was the most comfortable she’d ever been stripping off.
Speaking to The New York Times in 2009, she explained: ‘I think I’ve been lucky any time I’ve been asked to do any kind of nudity on-screen or any type of love scene, I’ve been lucky because I’ve always believed in the scene.
‘I’ve always felt like that’s absolutely right, that should be there. And if I haven’t, if I felt there was something a little bit much or we haven’t needed it, I’ve always felt comfortable enough to say to the director, you know what, this is maybe just pushing it a little far and perhaps it’s unnecessary.’
She continued: ‘The truth is that I’m really used to it now but I’m lucky, I’m really comfortable in my own skin. I’m comfortable with all the imperfections that I have and I don’t feel the need to hide any of those things because I do think it’s very important that women on-screen are portrayed as real women. I do believe in this thing and I’ll wave that flag probably until the day I die.
‘Quite honestly, I think about the feeling of being naked for five seconds… I just get on with it. It’s weird but I just do.’
Titanic sex scene
Perhaps Kate’s most iconic scene of them all – with Leonardo DiCaprio in the back of a steamy car as the biggest ship in the world was sinking.
In a throwback interview with Rolling Stone from 1998, the actress revealed: ‘We’d do the most ridiculous things to each other. He’d be tickling me, groping me, winding me up. And I’d be doing the same thing back, sort of grabbing his bum…
‘Even though I didn’t feel that way about Leo, it was quite nice to sort of feel that way in the scene. It was quite lovely. And then, y’know, the camera stopped rolling, and he gets up and walks off, and the scene’s done.’
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