Kate Winslet Refused to Let Her ‘Bulgy Belly’ Be Edited From a ‘Mare of Easttown’ Sex Scene
Kate Winslet fought for “a bulgy bit of belly” to be kept in her Mare of Easttown sex scene.
It’s important to Winslet that the character of Mare Sheehan looked like a real, middle-aged working mom.
“I will be 46 in October—I guess that’s why people have connected with this character in the way that they have done because there are clearly no filters,” she said.
Kate Winslet is committed to authenticity, on and off-screen. That’s why she advocated for her latest character, detective Mare Sheehan in HBO’s Mare of Easttown, to look like the tired, working mom she is—“bulgy bit of belly” and all. The actress recently told The New York Times that director Craig Zobel tried to edit her stomach from a sex scene, to which she replied: “Don’t you dare!”
“[Mare’s] a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from. I think we’re starved of that a bit,” Winslet told The Times. “I will be 46 in October—I guess that’s why people have connected with this character in the way that they have done because there are clearly no filters.”
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, the Titanic star said she intentionally kept on weight for the role. “I hate to talk about weight, but I only say it in the context of, [not losing weight] was a conscious effort on my part to really make sure that I didn’t shrink or change myself for the sake of being naked. I did the opposite,” she said.
But Mare’s real look didn’t stop there. Winslet also sent back some promotional material because her wrinkles were retouched. “I know how many lines I have by the side of my eye,” she told The Times.
Even HBO tried to spruce up the character’s appearance, but Winslet wasn’t having it. “HBO said, ‘Does Kate have to look so …’ And I said, ‘What, like sh*t? Yes. Kate does have to look like sh*t,” she recalled to The Times of the U.K.
And just because she didn’t lose weight for the role doesn’t mean she didn’t train for it. “I had to physically do a lot of tackling and fighting and arresting people, you know, taking huge grown men down to the ground,” she told Emmy magazine. “It’s nice to sense that Mare was once strong in her youth, but I didn’t want to make her an impossible, superhuman 40-something-year-old. Most women aren’t like that. We do what we can in the midst of the juggle of everything else.”
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