Kate Winslet refused to let her body be edited for Mare Of Easttown sex scene

Everyone is talking about her performance in the brilliant Mare of Easttown, and now Kate Winslet has opened up about how she refused to let the series director, Craig Zobel, edit her body for her character’s sex scene with Richard Ryan, played by Guy Pierce (also her co-star in Mildred Pierce).

In an interview with The New York Times, she acknowledged that her character, Mare Sheehan’s, distinctly unfiltered appearance has got people talking, saying that she knew people would be saying, “Oh my God, how can she let herself look so unglamorous?”

She explained when Craig Zobel, the show’s director, informed her he would cut “a bulgy bit of belly” from her sex scene with Pearce she was utterly against the idea, telling him, “Don’t you dare!”

At all times, she strove for realism when it came to her character. Mare is in her midlife, and Winslet said that’s what the audience should see.

“I hope that in playing Mare as a middle-aged woman — 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’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.”

She said she balked when she saw an early cut in which her usually luminous skin looked too good. “We tried to light it to make it look not nice,” she said, adding she also sent the show’s promo poster back twice because it was too retouched. “They were like ‘Kate, really, you can’t,’ and I’m like ‘Guys, I know how many lines I have by the side of my eye, please put them all back.’”

She has previously said she feels “a sense of responsibility for how other women view themselves.” She is often considered a spokesperson for healthy body image, and in 2003, openly criticised GQ Magazine for airbrushing a cover image of her.

“I do think we have a responsibility to the younger generation of women,” Winslet said previously. “I think they do look at magazines, I think they do look to women who have been successful in their chosen careers, and they want people to look up to. And I would always want to be telling the truth about who I am to that generation because they’ve got to have strong leaders.”

We absolutely need more of the Kate Winslet approach when it comes to how women are portrayed on screeen.