Sunday Sitdown with Willie Geist - Kate Winslet

Episode Date: March 17, 2024

On this week's episode, Willie sat down with Academy Award Winner Kate Winslet to talk about her latest role in the buzzy new miniseries "The Regime", the disorienting whirlwind of "Titanic" and much more.  Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hey guys, Willie Geist here with another episode of the Sunday Sit Down podcast. My thanks as always for clicking and listening along. I am very excited to bring in my conversation today with a woman who really needs no introduction. Oscar winner, Kate Winslet. She's currently starring in the HBO Max series The Regime in which she plays a fictional dictator in a vaguely European nation who's kind of losing her grip on power but also on reality. and finding ways to bring it back. It has huge echoes of what's happening around the world,

including, by the way, in America right now. It's a comedy, but with certainly a dramatic twist to it. She's amazing in it. So she'll talk about that role, how she found the accent that you can't quite put your finger on and why she thought that was important. We'll also talk about her long road to get to this part, including, obviously, Titanic.

In 1997, she was 22 years old when Titanic came out, turned her life upside. down, obviously. She co-starred with Leonardo DiCaprio with what at the time was the biggest movie in the history of Hollywood and also how she sort of downshifted after that. She didn't like the life of a celebrity. She didn't like the judgment she received suddenly about her looks and the movie itself. And she was disoriented. You know, she said she went overnight from living in a little two-bedroom flat to walking outside and almost having seizures because of all the flash bulbs of photographers that were chasing her. So we get into all of that, her amazing career.

She's done so much, such great choices, won the Academy Award in 2009 for the reader. She's been nominated for seven Oscars, won five BAFTAs, five Golden Globes for SAG Awards, two Emmys. Some of those awards came from Mayor of East Town. My goodness, was she amazing in that, and nailing a very specific Philadelphia area accent as well there. I should point out, as we turn the interview over to you. Kate was not feeling well as we sat down. And God bless her, she insisted on showing up and doing the interview. So a little sniffly maybe, but no worse for where and so open and honest as she sipped a little bit of tea while we chatted. Huge respect for her as an actress. And I think you'll really appreciate her as a person too. Kate Winslet right now

on the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Thank you for doing this. You're welcome. We should say for our viewers and our listeners that you are playing through the pain today. Thank you for that. I'm a little under par, which I never am. So I find it just frustrating. I pride myself on being fairly bionic. Actually, when we filmed the regime, I was the only one across six months who didn't get sick. Most people got COVID.

I didn't. I just plowed on through. I was like a pack horse. Yeah, so it's unfortunate that I'm feeling underpast today, but here I am. Well, you're under par is well above par. We will take it. We will take it. So let's talk about the regime.

Oh, my gosh, I love this show. I've watched three episodes. I just told you I'm halfway through the miniseries. Your character, the chancellor, is an authoritarian leader. I think it's fair to say from a vaguely eastern Middle European nation. How do you describe this show when people ask you what it's about? So at first glance, it is, it is, as you say, a film set within an authoritarian regime in a small fictional country somewhere in central Europe. And I play slightly larger than life, absurd, sometimes repulsive, sometimes oddly lovable, challenging.

female dictator whose grapple for power only serves to make her more and more emotionally fragmented and things sort of start to fall apart around the seams as she falls apart and the country subsequently does the same thing. So that's at first glance how I would describe it. But then there's this other really fantastic unexpected dynamic, which is that she finds herself totally falling in love with a very unlikely ex-soldier who is employed to take care of her and only her. And what you kind of realize is that these two individuals from totally disparate backgrounds actually probably have quite extreme abandonment issues and kind of come crashing together in spite of what you might think could happen. These two people become obsessed.

with one another and it's quite funny. Yes, it is. It's quite funny. It's funny. We're smiling for people who haven't seen it as we talk about authoritarianism. Because the show is funny, it's a parody and a satire of a lot of what we see around the world, frankly, these days. I have to imagine playing this chancellor though was like a dream come true on the page because there was so much it seems to me you could do with it. You could sort of make her the way you wanted to.

Is that fair to say? It is fair to say. And the scripts when I was first sent them, as we all, us actors, were sent them in the full six episodic set out. So like with Marev Easton, for example, I read one episode and the second one was being worked on. But I knew after one, oh my God, I have to play this role. And what was wonderful about the regime is that with something that is so sharp and so specific, and so, as you say, there is this very clever geopolitical kind of backdrop. But nevertheless, getting the humor, that satirical side of things and really understanding where that went in terms of the trajectory, 1 through 6, that was very important to me.

And I just had honestly, I just had never read anything like it. I mean, to play such a phenomenal role as I'm approaching 50 now, you know, it's like, you know, you do dream that something new is going to come along all the time. And I love to do that and mix it up and take risks and do things that people might not expect and challenge myself and scare myself. When I read this, I just thought, oh my God, how on earth would I play this? I have, I don't know where I begin. Okay, let's go. You know, it's like, oh, my God, what am I doing? And I had many moments of panic.

I would sit at our kitchen table with just all the scripts out and we'd be a couple of weeks away from starting shooting. And I would just sit with my eyes closed and say to my husband, just I can't. I can't. Just call them up. Just call them. Just call someone and just say. She's just not going to do it now. And just here's a great list of wonderful people who would be excellent in this role.

Oh, you'd prepare alternates. I had a full list, one through five in order of who would be best. No, lots of moments of panic. But, you know, one of the great things was being in a pack of actors. You know, I love being in a room full of actors. Actors are so odd and interesting and inspiring. And Matthias Scunitz, who plays opposite me, he plays Herbert Zubak. He's just extraordinary, the power in him and the playfulness.

And he's very funny. And that served us really, really well when we're kind of standing around in Vienna at 3 o'clock in the morning. And he's still cracking jokes. He was wonderful. But coming out the other side of COVID, actually, I hadn't realized quite how much I had, were not just missed being in a collaborative group of actors like that. But emotionally, I really needed it. I thought I had kind of done okay.

And actually, I had missed that a lot. So to be in that group with Andrea Reisbrough and Martha Plimpton and Hugh Grant, I mean, my God, you know, and a whole list of wonderful British actors. It was just amazing. It was just amazing. Maybe a reminder of why you started acting to be around people like that. That's it. That's exactly it.

And to be with Stephen Fris and Jessica Hobbes, you know, two directors. So Stephen Fris directed episodes one, two, and four, and Jessica did three, five, and six. And to have that sort of male-female combination gave us such a wonderful balance. And I appreciated that. And it was great to work with Jessica. She's been chipping away at a directing career for years. And she's really something else. And it was, yeah, it was terrific fun.

Hey, guys, thanks for listening to the Sunday Sit Down podcast. Stick around to hear more from. from Kate Winslet right after the break. Welcome back now more of my conversation with Kate Winslet. So you said you weren't quite sure where to start when you read the page for the Chancellor? Yeah. Which raises the question.

Where did you start? Was it the accent? Was it a look? Well, I knew, I felt instinctively right away, I mustn't sound like myself. Because as I was saying to you before we started rolling, even though I've been doing this job for 31 years, and I'm always doing different dialects.

and accents and things, people do know what I sound like. And I just don't feel comfortable speaking like myself, because that's me. But also, I felt that with a show like this, that was originally also called The Palace, by the way, it was called the regime about two months into shooting. They came up with this different title. But when it was called the Palace,

I was quite nervous that if I opened my mouth and I spoke like that, that people would automatically assume that they were watching the story about the British monarchy. So it was important right away that we were able to establish that this was somewhere else. It is an imagined universe. But also that there is humour to be found. And in order to find the humour, which was on the page, very much on the page, but to be able to lean into that, I had to create a multi-dimensional character. So I couldn't just do a funny or a thing or a gimmick or a voice.

So my job was very much to root it in a place that felt initially just real to me and that that kind of gave me a sort of a foundation. So what I did, and again, I was fortunate that Will Tracy, our showrunner and creator, with his team of writers, what he had done on the page was to give Elena this really rich backstory, which is referenced in that you see she has a father who is deceased, and yet she still goes and has little chats with daddy. in the glass casket down in the catacombs of the palace where they live. So you know right away this is not a normal person.

This is not a person of sound mind. So what does that tell me? Well, that tells me that that's got to come from somewhere. So I was able to dig right back. You know, this man was a pretty tyrannical father. He clearly made her feel like the less than favored child. Her mother is, God knows where it's alluded to the fact that maybe there were some issues with alcohol with the mother, some mental health concerns.

and she was just locked up, basically, by the father. So this is a character clearly has got mother issues, abandonment issues, serious father issues. And so I then thought, well, hang on a second. How do I weave into that something that feels emotionally rich, but also real? So I actually spoke to a neuroscientist and a psychologist about the impact on a child that certain traumas when exposed in early life. how those things can affect them and live in them, and how does it impact on how they are emotionally, mentally,

physically, how they interact with people, sometimes how they speak. And so I was able to then make choices that I felt were fair and believable. And from that, created this character who has so many mental health and emotional issues that they just live in her all the time. and she's a leader, you know, and she wants to look poised, and she wants to come across as being the perfect person, but of course it's all a mask. So then it's like, okay, what's she hiding?

What's she hiding? What are these things that she has become perhaps a little ashamed of that she's tried to keep hidden? And that then gave me scope to kind of play with how much or how little you see of how she speaks and that level of hysteria and how that manifests itself depending on who she's with, like her father, for example, it comes out just a little bit more, you know, because it lives in her body and it's somewhere up here. So it was, there was a lot to kind of consider because I

had to make it feel real for me. And then hopefully that translated as something that was a believable character on some level. By the way, that was just a master class. That was so fascinating to hear you describe that. I thought you were going to say, well, I tried a few into my audio notes and that one sounded good. Listen, at the end of the day, it's all about what can I do to not get found out. Well, you've done it again. God forbid. God forbid. It is your, and the daddy issues, as you say,

they've reared their head in a very dark way. In the episode I've just watched. And then Zubak sort of takes on some of that energy, it feels like, and she goes back to that place of, oh, there's this man who's sort of screaming at me again. It's this constant need for approval, you know, approval. validation and actually before Zubak comes along, you know, what she does is whenever she says to people, do I look nice?

She doesn't wait for an answer. Do I look nice? Yes, I look nice. Let's go. You know, she's just, it's this sort of like these false affirmations all the time of just something to just be able to keep going. And that was there in the script. And so for me to kind of peek behind the curtain as to okay, why does she keep saying?

And I'm marvelous, aren't I? Let's go. Yes. Let's go. Good, good, quick, happy, happy. Like, when someone tells me, that that's narcissism on the whole other level, you know, it's borderline personality disorder, its goodness knows how many mental health things. And I was able to pull from each of those things once I'd kind of fully educated myself on what that means. And yeah. How do I look? Should not be a rhetorical question that you answer yourself, right? Yes. How do I look? I look marvelous. I mean, goodness me, something else. So you're doing the

accent right here and what I notice is a little bit of a lisp. An accent I can't identify exactly, which as you say, it's by design. And the way you use your mouth sort of juts to one side or it does something, is that something you work on in the mirror? Is it something you and your husband work on? How do you arrive ultimately? It ultimately came about as a result of trying to really understand her emotional backstory and what she has had to overcome in order to just look in the mirror each day and say, no, I can do this.

Yes, I believe in myself. And that thing of trying to hide something. So it was really a case of, well, what can I do that doesn't feel gimmicky or in any way false, but also can be seen in varying degrees? And also, what was really helpful for me, I have to say, was that I didn't do it by myself. I mean, I didn't have a coach or anything like that for the, for how I chose to speak. But because everyone was using a different accent as their characters, it meant that there was a lot of collaboration around how I would speak and why. It was the subject of much discussion. I mean, literally across not just myself and Jessica, but also Will Tracy, also are kind of bosses at HBO. Everyone had to, I think, have an opinion on what it was going to be.

just because actually it wasn't written really exactly that way on the page. But you see, that's the great privilege as an actor is that you sometimes get to go in and go, okay, lift a lid. Oh, there's another lid. Ooh, that's juicy. Ooh, what's inside that one?

It's a great privilege to be in a position where you can experiment and play like that. And also share your ideas and be brave enough to have people say, not quite sure, maybe try this, not so much that. And that happens all the time, but on the regime, it was really important that we all contributed. Yeah, I didn't want to feel like I was by myself. Right, right.

I lent on the great expertise around me. It is a great ensemble. I mean, everyone who walks into the room brings something new and different. And you talk about the mask that Elena wears, the deep insecurities that are there, which are true of every dictator of all time, right? They're projecting something. There's some trauma. whatever it is.

So I know you have not said that this is representative of any one man or woman over history or today or anything else. But what are those characteristics of an authoritarian leader, this projection of strength, this attempt to connect with the people, all of those things that you wanted to bring to the character? You know, it was so unique and absurdist that it almost felt impossible to really base her. on any specific person. Also, the other thing that I would have to say, we all wanted to honour, was that this is not a documentary, it's not a recreation of historical events,

it's not a retelling of actual situations or things that have happened. And I felt safer the more I lent into the absurdist side of the story. Also, the skill with which the writers had researched and prepared and put together this phenomenally sharp script really meant that we were very supported by, brilliant minds. I just knew I had to play this character

like no one else I'd ever played before. Really? You know, I had to think, okay, she has to just be so far away from Mersheon or so far away from, I don't know, Clementine Krasinski. She's just got to be something else. Otherwise, you know, go big or go home, you know?

And fun, right? Isn't it fun to play someone like this? So much fun. So much fun, especially when you can just sometimes make stuff up. I mean, there's a whole sequence at the beginning of episode six where we end up in a car. I won't, there's no spoilers here, but we end up in a car,

and I can promise you, literally every word of dialogue that comes out of our mouths in that entire sequence is completely improvised. So there's a lot of trust that goes on from a creative standpoint

when, you know, the actors are let loose in the back of a teeny tiny car. And they use that take, which is great, right? Oh, yeah. If it's good, it's good. Oh, but there's also the most fantastic gag reel

of just the scenes in the back of the car, which is a treasure and a joy. and I shall keep forever. Hopefully they'll post that, so the rest of us can enjoy it as well. I do hope so, yeah. I'm curious, Kate, how you said this was a role you had to play, unlike any other in your career, how you assess a role at this point in your career.

You've done so much. You've won every award that can be won. You balance the fact that you have children and all the things that go into these decisions. How do you know this is a job worth taking six months of my life? I think for me what it is is if I read something and I then can't get it out of my head. If it stays with me, I actually read something the other day and I can't stop thinking about it. I can't say how would I play that and play her and what could I add and how can I, you know, pull it apart and put it back together again.

And it's the most extraordinary privilege of my life to have earned the right to be able to choose. I mean, I swear I can't believe it. And it's not just about choosing the parts. It's about choosing the when to work or not. And that part is important to me. And I do find as I'm getting older, it might not appear like it from the outside looking in, but going back to not working as much as I did

when I feel like I kind of rocketed through my 30s doing really quite a lot of stuff. And actually, I just can't do that anymore because it takes so much of me when I go to work. And sometimes, like, for example, with perhaps say Hannah Schmidt that I played in The Reader

or Lee Miller in the movie I did about her right before the regime at the end of 2022, you know, even if you might be traveling and going with your family, emotionally, you're still leaving them a bit. You know, you still have to kind of let them get on with it a bit.

And I find that really hard. It's easier now. that my older two are older, me is 23, my son Joe is 20, so they're kind of, they more have their own lives. So they need me, they still need me, but it's not the same as kind of making sure that, yeah, exactly, like literally filling a fridge with, they fill their own fridge now, you know what I mean? So, so yeah, there's just a lot of consideration that goes into it, but quite honestly that thing of reading a script and feeling so ignited by a role or a piece of writing, or even the idea of working with a certain director

and that not being able to go away, that kind of like dog with a bone feeling. That's sort of the thing I try and really listen to. And I've been very lucky that I've been able to follow through and end up playing those roles for the most part. It served you very well, I would say. Yeah, I've been very blessed. I've been very blessed.

I imagine Merivistown was one of those as well. You read the first episode and said, I'm in? Honestly, it's only now that I can talk about Mayor and not fall apart. Because it really sort of messed me up coming out the other side. I just, when you play a character who's carrying that level of exposure to trauma as Mayor was in having experienced the loss of her son and the way that she loses him and never, ever spoke about it, never, never discussed it, not even with her mother, not even with her daughter, who had also physically been there on the day that it had happened.

I mean, the actor who played Kevin in the flashback sequences, I couldn't even look him in the eye. I had somehow I had changed something inside of myself in order to carry that level of trauma. It was awful, honestly. And I kept thinking, Kate, you're just the fucking actor. It's just the job. What's the big deal?

Like, don't get so self-indulgent. Throw it off, walk away. But I just couldn't. It was absolutely weird. And that's something that I have found has happened to me as I'm getting older. I don't know whether it's hormones or just kind of, I don't know, going a little softer on the inside. Although I've always been pretty soft on the inside. But I just, I couldn't shake it off.

And I had to kind of really take a minute to kind of wait for it to leave my system. It was completely strange. But I do know that a lot of actors that that kind of thing has happened for. And it's interesting. We don't really talk about it that often because, I mean, publicly like I am now, because it kind of does make you sound like, I've got it, surely it's just a job. Don't you just learn your lines and go to work and throw it off?

But sometimes they do sort of get a little bit stuck. And it's been really fascinating talking to other performers about that saying of what it takes sometimes and how to come out the other side and get back to life again. And it's just not always easy. I guess that's why I just can't do it all the time because it's just, it costs me too much sometimes, you know? Yeah, I was going to say,

that from other actors too, that a role of that depth or if there's trauma involved or in this case harm to a child, all of those things, you just, it weighs, right? There's a heaviness and it feels real. Yeah, and I also think that, you know, I think the world that we live in today, I think there is so much more pressure on teenagers and just that, that almost like fight for mental survival in the midst of smartphones and social media, I mean, don't even get me started. Oh, I'm waiting. I'm waiting. you. I just, it's unbearable, you know, and algorithms and how they are literally destroying an entire generation. I think because the character of Kevin and Mare was very similar in age to both of my older two children, it just felt so close to home. I was a constant reminder to me of how, it was a constant reminder to me of how fortunate I am that my two have never had social media. To this day, they don't have it.

I have none. No. Good for you. You're a good mom. Well, you know, it's hard to do. It was a choice that we made as parents. And honestly, I will tell you, it wasn't that hard saying to them, we really don't want you to have this. And they're saying, oh, why?

It's not fair. And that's how everyone communicates. And I'll miss out on the parties. If they want to invite you, they will phone you up. You are a great person. You're a really good friend. You're not going to miss out, promise you. But why?

Why, why, why? We get one shot at giving you a good childhood, and we don't want to look back and ever regret. So that's why. And seriously, they kind of just accepted it. There was occasional pushback. Oh, I really know I'm doing this art thing, and I want to share some of my images.

Are you sure? Are you sure? If you get more dislikes than likes, how are you going to feel about that piece of artwork that you were really proud of yesterday? Think it through. And then they sort of started to decide for themselves, and now, and this is what's fascinating,

their friends are so envious of them because they just don't have any interest in it and their lives aren't governed by it or dictated by it in any way and they do feel grateful which is really lovely and they do not spend their lives like this which is hey that's what we tell our kids your head should be up in life shouldn't be down here right lost in this world yeah you're not going to find the meaning of life

no any blue clouds that are better there then they are up there. Well said. It's true. You should be like a public parent spokesperson for everyone of how to handle this because it is. It's the challenge of our time for so many parents. Yeah, it really is. But we digress.

Yeah. The accent, just one more about mayor, because that accent, I grew up in New Jersey. No people from Philly who are predisposed to say, she didn't get it. Who said? She got it. She got the accent. Was that a hard? one. It drove me insane. It drove me insane. And I would say to Brad Ingallsby, the writer,

I would say, do you understand that I have to do this well, but not just well, I have to do it better than everyone else on this show, because people are waiting for me to screw it up. People know how I sound. So I have to do it so well that it just disappears. And that was the part that was difficult. Getting it into a place of like you can't hear, hopefully hear me doing it, that was, I found that difficult. Yeah. And that's the city where they booed Santa Claus. So if you did it wrong, you would have heard about it by now. Oh, no. Well, my goodness. Well done. Thank you. But it's a funny accent. Even people in different parts of America don't quite know what it is that they're hearing. Right. Because the O, you know, it's such a strange noise.

It's like, it's a, it's very odd. Can you still pull these out like a party track? Not really. Don't ask me to do much more. I won't, but I'm just curious. Actually, if I have to go into full mayor, I'm definitely going to not get it right. There are some I can do, some I can access easier than others, but that was a very, very difficult one. Yeah. It was well done.

It was very, very impressive. It could have been a disaster, and it was fantastic. Thank you. As all the awards approved. Stick around for more of my conversation with Kate Winslet right after a break. Welcome back now to the rest of my conversation with Kate Winslet. So your earliest days as an actor, was there any chance you were not going to become an actress given where you came from? Was that always the dream?

Well, when you're little, you know, and people say, when I grow up, I want to be a vet. When I grow up, I want to be a hairdresser. When I grow up, I want to be a teacher. I would think to myself, when I grow up, I want to be on stage. But I didn't know how to say it. And so I would say, when I grow up, I want to be an air hostess, or I want to be a hairdresser, or I want to be a makeup. I would come up with all these things because I didn't really know, sort of know how to kind of declare it or something. I just imagined it.

But I certainly never thought that I would be in films. Also, I came from a family of people who there was really not much money. And so we didn't even get a VCR until I was 15. And I really remember getting it. And it was like secondhand from, I don't know who. And we had three VHS cassettes. One of them was a chorus line. One of them was Bugsy Malone.

And the other one was some terrible sort of recording of seven episodes of a British soap opera or something. But I would just watch them endlessly. But it was watching Bugsy Malone and having the realization that what Jodie Foster was doing was acting and that she was a kid. And that, wow, that's a thing. That's a thing. Oh, that's a thing. Maybe I want to do that. But I have no idea how that would happen or where to begin.

But, you know, I sometimes say to people, this whole thing of me having this career, like, I shouldn't even be here. I mean, I don't come from, I know it's difficult for people to believe because I speak well. But I've learned that. I don't come from the kind of privilege that people often would assume lends itself. I, you know, I grew up going to drama clubs that. you would pay 25p, the equivalent of a quarter, I guess, on the door, you know, for an hour's classes. And it would be in like a scout hut or like a church hall or village community centre. And back in the day, there were plenty of those. And what makes me sad actually now

is that there are fewer and fewer of those kinds of organisations, certainly in my own country, that really support people who would otherwise not have any access whatsoever to creative expression in that way. And so I feel very fortunate to have grown up, at least around a family of people who knew that there's so much joy to be found in acting. Just forget the getting paid part, just the doing it. I was very lucky that I had that in my life, very, very lucky. And you've kept the joy like we just talked about.

You love being on a set with a bunch of actors. I love it. I love it. I love it. I can't tell you. And even that thing of like you look at the call sheet and your pickup time might be, you know, 350 a.m. or 4.10 a.m. I mean, I'm sure you've done it yourself. To me, I feel like, yeah, you know, it's like having a secret. It's like going to work. And I sometimes say to myself,

in the dark, being driven to work, well, here I am. You know, someone's driving me. I have my little coffee in my thermos. I'm running my lines. Who else gets to do this? Who else gets to go to work in the middle of the night and go into that space and just get to create and come up with stuff all day long. Oh, I just love it. I treasure it. I love it. I take such, it's like a great glass of red wine. I love every sip. I just appreciate it so much.

So you crush your role as Mary in the Nativity play when you're five years old at school. Crushed it. Crushed it. Crushed it. You get commercials, acting gigs. Didn't get that many commercials. By the way, I was kind of like the arm on the left side of screen, you know. It's a really bad yellow sweatshirt.

Hey, it's a gig. It's a peg. And actually it was, and I was paid 60 pounds. And I remember thinking, I'm going to spend this on something I like. And I bought a terrible, like, faux leather jacket from, like, the local, I mean, I want to say farmer's market. Obviously, it wasn't just a farmer's market, but a version of that. And I spent all of the 60 pounds on this terrible faux leather jacket, and I've no idea

where that's gone to. I wish I've kept it. It should be at a museum somewhere. Oh, no. No, it really shouldn't. That's okay. But I think it's fair to say you got your break in heavenly creatures, which is 30 years old this year, by the way.

Yes, believe it or not. Well aware. Yeah, so you know. And then obviously when Titanic comes out in 1997, everything changes for you. Career-wise, but also personally, right? Now you're a celebrity. Now you want to be.

Yes. People want to see you. They want to judge you, all of those things. What was that moment like in your life as that became a phenomenon. You know, it's really interesting. I've kind of only allowed myself in the last few years to kind of talk about the fact that whilst on the one hand, there were the most extraordinary upsides in terms of career opportunity and choice of role and all those things that I talked about before. But actually, in its most acute phase of titanicness, it was really

not much fun because I didn't have kind of an infrastructure, I guess, that went hand in hand with being a famous person. Like I lived in a small little two-bedroom flat in North London. You know, I didn't have, like, security outside my home. I could never have afforded that kind of thing. Also, you know, when you were given opportunities like that, when you're young and you're a girl, you just shut up and be grateful. So there was a lot of kind of, yeah, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you.

You know, and even my family, God bless them and they are wonderful. But isn't it exciting, darling? Oh, God, great. You know, could we come? And is it okay, if we invite Auntie Rita? like, you know, I'm just trying to figure out how to walk out the door and not have an epileptic fit because of how many paparazzi flash bulbs there were in my face. And so being someone who had been raised in an extremely loving, nurturing, normal family, suddenly everything was abnormal

and normal life was inaccessible to me. And I found that very traumatic, I have to say. And also scrutiny in a way that that's, thank God, doesn't happen anymore. Right. And that has all changed. And so I felt like I really had to sort of stand up for myself. But even when I was saying publicly, well, you know, don't have a go at me for having curves. That's kind of just how I am. There was still a part of me that thought, do people really think I'm fat? Like, I'm not fat. I'm just healthy, normal person. That's how I am. But kind of being scrutinized for it and having to almost explain myself or my shape was just wrong. And the fact that that doesn't happen anymore makes me want to weep for joy.

I tell you, it's just great. You know, I watch wonderful actresses now. They have a voice. They play incredible roles. They don't have to explain it. They don't have to say, well, you know, playing a role of a trailblazer is really great because X, Y, and Z, they're just doing it.

They are just doing it. And it's extraordinary to see. And they just learn how to walk onto a set and take ownership right away. That equal level of ownership to the guys, they have it. It's, you know, they're good. It's like amazing to me.

Well, you had probably a role in some of that progress, which is to say this is not okay what was happening to Kate Winslet. You know, if you were a step on the ladder. I hope in some quiet way, I like, you know, I sifted through the rubble and in the hope that maybe one day things would change. And so now I can quietly say, maybe I did have a little bit to do with that. I hope I did. Just a bit.

And it had a lot to do with the choices you made after Titanic. Is that fair to say as well? It really did. I mean, I definitely, you know, there were phenomenal, sometimes quite big opportunities that came right away. But honestly, I felt really afraid of. And because I had been raised by two really great people, Roger and Sally, who were absolutely lovely and knew how to live a wholesome life without the means. So I was never raised to believe that in order to be happy, there had to be financial, you know, compensation, buoying those choices. So that was never a driving factor for me.

And I was extraordinarily fortunate to have had that, you know, because it just meant that I could I could just sort of take a step back and was able to at least recognize, hang on a second, okay, I'm famous, but I don't feel like I want to be famous. Also, I'm not, I'm not good enough. I have to, I've got to learn stuff. I've got to experience the kind of anxiety. of playing this role and that role and learn from it and make mistakes and grow. I didn't want to be in the spotlight and make a mistake that could then have become cutthroat. I didn't want that. I wanted to just quietly step away and learn and look at the world and be in the world,

which being famous, you know, it was quite difficult to just be in the world and have a spotlight shining so brightly in one's face. I found that very challenging. But I've been able to kind of, you know, pull back and just do my thing and have a very private life. And my God, do I treasure that, you know? And you do great work. I mean, you look at your resume. There are just no misses in there.

So you've done great. Thank you. I know you have to go. I really appreciate your time. Congratulations on the regime. And thank you for powering through with the tea. Thank you. Thank you.

My big thanks to Kate for a great conversation and for powering through that cold to join me. You can check out The Regime on HBO Max. And my thanks to all of you for listening again this week. If you want to hear more of our conversations every week, be sure to click follow so you never miss an episode. And don't forget to tune in to Sunday today every weekend on NBC. I'm Willie Geist. We'll see you right back here next week on the Sunday Sit Down Pires.