Kate Winslet shared unseen insights from her shoot days while filming an unstable character.
In a recent chat on the Lessons from Our Mothers podcast, the Titanic actress revealed that she once “went mad” after starring as a troubled character and in order to recover, she took “proper support”.
“There’s this thing that happens as an actor, and it sounds very self-indulgent so I very rarely say it,” she began. “But when you play a really difficult part – I think of Mare of Easttown, for example, which flattened me, my god – you do have to kind of come out the other side.”
She continued, “I call it re-entry. Re-entry into your own life, going back into your friendships, reintegrating into the rhythm of family again. Exiting a family, leaving people behind, letting a character go”.
She further noted, “It takes a while, actually, to unpick a character from your system, especially if you have played them for a long time, which, with television, you really do”.
Kate especially mentioned her role in Mare Easttown, in which she played a detective dealing with personal trauma, which stretched her to the brink.
She shared, “It was meant to be a six-month shoot”. “Covid happened after the five months that we had been shooting, and everything got pushed, and when we came back, our five remaining weeks turned into 10”.
Kate confessed, “By the end of the whole thing, I’d been playing that character for over a year. And I really, honestly went a bit mad. It was quite weird”.
She further shared that she took professional help to recover from the character, “It’s the only time in my life that I actually had to get some proper help, to come back to myself”.
Kate added, “It sounds completely insane, and even as I say it, I feel quite uncomfortable saying it, because I’m aware of how bonkers and indulgent that can sound”.