Over the years, I’ve grown to dislike Kate Winslet’s personality, but I still watch her movies and TV shows. I loved Mare of Easttown, it was a great limited series and one of the best series of 2021, honestly. The White Lotus was so stupid, I hated that series so much, but Mare was where it was at. Since most of the TV awards separate “limited series actors” with regular series actors, I think Kate is probably a leading contender for many awards for Mare. As she should be, she did a great job as a harried, vaping, 40-something cop in a gritty, working-class Pennsylvania town. Kate is doing some awards-season campaigning right now, which is why this Guardian interview happened:
On Mare’s no-makeup, gritty appearance: “The discussion about how Mare looked blew my mind. People were asking, ‘Did she gain weight? Didn’t she look frumpy? Wasn’t that brave of her?’ But why should that be brave? I suppose because it’s not how leading actresses are represented. Maybe Mare will be the tipping point, and we’re going to stop scrutinising women on screen quite so much. We were always saying on set: ‘That’s too TV. Keep it real.’ I’d constantly be rubbing Marmite into the knees of my jeans, or scuffing up my sneakers with a Brillo pad. You can’t just make one thing feel real: it has to be everything.”
Mare was Peak Pandemic: “Mare is how most of us felt through lockdown. She validated the permanent pyjama look…It came along just as people badly needed something to discuss other than who they knew who had died from Covid. It put families on couches, and there was a nostalgic quality to the one-episode-a-week format. It gets conversation going while you’re waiting for the next one…. [But] Covid has taught me how to binge. In more ways than one. But yes, Ned and I watched Ted Lasso pretty much back-to-back. Covid made you not feel so bad about hanging out on the couch.”
Middle-aged actresses: “Middle-aged women have long been underestimated, disrespected and disregarded in the film and television community, and now that’s changing. Look at the actresses who won at the Emmys. None of us were in our 20s by any means, and that’s cool! I feel way cooler as a fortysomething actress than I ever imagined I would.”
Whether American cop shows should reflect the real-life qualms about cops: “I don’t know if I’m going to be playing Mare again. But if we were to do a second season, then for sure these atrocities which have existed in the police force here and in America will find their way into the stories we tell. One hundred per cent. You can’t pretend these things haven’t happened. It’s horrible, isn’t it? This moment in time. It’s horrific. You can hear me, I can’t quite find the words because we all feel so betrayed and powerless. We have to turn this moment into something meaningful. We have to use our voices on behalf of people who don’t have one. That matters to me now in ways that hadn’t even crossed my mind in my 20s.”
Seeing Leo DiCaprio for the first time in three years: “I couldn’t stop crying. I’ve known him for half my life! It’s not as if I’ve found myself in New York or he’s been in London and there’s been a chance to have dinner or grab a coffee and a catchup. We haven’t been able to leave our countries. Like so many friendships globally, we’ve missed each other because of Covid. He’s my friend, my really close friend. We’re bonded for life.”
The Leo thing is always funny to me because Leo does not have many female friends at all, historically speaking. He has his bros, his P-ssy Posse, his Wolf Pack and they’re all dudes. But he has made an exception for Kate, and he probably thinks of her as someone like a sister. Plus, she obviously adores him and strokes his ego, which he loves too.
As for all the Mare stuff… I honestly thought Kate looked fine as Mare? It wasn’t like they “uglied her up” for the role, she was just a 40-something woman in comfortable clothes and barely-there makeup. She looked like a normal person with good skin, as opposed to “it’s so brave for this haggard witch to look so ugly.”
Photos courtesy of HBO, Backgrid.
Uh huh, if you really want to feel undervalued and disrespected, wait until you get past middle age.
Strongly agree. May I add that at a certain age you become invisible. How great is that?
Yeah, that’s super great 🙄
I’m 47 and have been taking public transit and walking city streets since I was in single digit ages. The amount of harassment I have experienced over the years must be in astronomical numbers. And now the sexual harassment component is all but gone and I consider that an absolute blessing. There’s still hassling for money and petitions and religious indoctrination and all the things that happen on city streets (so I’m clearly not completely invisible) but good f*king riddance to the sexual harassment. Let’s embrace the power we have in this new stage of life!
Amy Rigby wrote a whole song about that!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zVS-YUldco0
Women who say that must be attractive, I’ve never gotten much attention from the opposite sex so no change at all for me
I was just going to say the same Eurydice! Personally I feel like I’m at my most powerful point in my life, I can see through bullshit at a single glance, I can listen with my whole being and love with my whole heart. Now, if only I could laugh with peeing a little bit, live would be perfect!
I agree Kate didn’t look like a haggard old witch in Mare 🙂 but she didn’t look like your typical glammed-up actress. I always think about when Jennifer Aniston played the small-town Walmart-type employee in The Good Girl, and they left her hair looking fantastic, like she’d just walked out of the most expensive salon in LA with the most expensive colour-job you can get. It bugged me, because it wasn’t true to the character and it distracted from the truth of the role. In Mare, Kate looks more real to me–I could relate to her messy hair and wrinkles.
I feel like my reading of Kate’s interview here is kind of exactly this – it’s not that SHE felt she looked particularly haggard or ugly (or whatever people described her as) but that she just looked normal. And if you leave the perfect hair or the heavy make-up, she wouldn’t have looked normal.
But, I think her point was also “look how CRAZY people went seeing a perfectly normal-looking woman in her 40s on television” and that seems to be the nuance some people are missing. I don’t think Kate cares that people called her haggard (or again, whatever) but rather that looking like a normal middle-aged woman is considered to be so revolutionary and brave because how dare she be “ugly” onscreen.
Yes, exactly this. And let’s face it, she’s not even a “normal” 40-something. She’s an extremely beautiful woman. And people still lost their minds about her looking more “natural”. And that it was somehow “haggard” and “brave”.
The only thing I disagree with is when she says “middle aged women have been disrespected and underestimated in film and television”. Middle aged women are disrespected and underestimated EVERYWHERE. Not just film and television.
I had a whole long reply to your post that got lost but I also feel like people are misinterpreting what Kate said here. Her point seemed to be that looking like a perfectly normal 40-something woman on television IS considered looking haggard and (frankly) ugly and that that is super messed up.
Not that SHE felt like she looked ugly.
And I remember that movie too. There’s a bunch of them where the people are supposed to be “normal” or “ugly” but they hired these gorgeous women and kept their hair and make-up fancy and just changed their clothes. It makes no sense.
But I do like that Kate didn’t gain weight in order to “look normal” (looking at you bridget Jones Diary.)
Kate is always whinging, if it’s not about being fat or lying about a C-section it’s something else.
While generally, I wouldn’t go out of my way to defend Kate, I feel like what she’s pointing out here isn’t that she’s upset about how people described her (in fact, she knew how people would view it) but rather that it’s crazy that a middle-aged woman who just looked perfectly normal onscreen was viewed as “brave” for being willing to be so “ugly”.
After reading about how poorly Kate treated Melanie Lynskey during their 1994 film Heavenly Creatures and the promo tour, I’m so over her. Mean girl then, doubtful she has changed.
Melanie didn’t have a bad word to say about Kate. Harvey Weinstein treated Melanie badly (surprise), not Kate. She was actually quite complimentary about Kate and just using her as an example of how at the time she was in awe of how Kate understood how to play the HW game and how to be beautiful and glamorous. She was talking about her own shyness and self-esteem issues, which Weinstein played into, not saying Kate was a mean girl.
Mostly she was called “brave” bc she wasn’t one percent fat free. Disheveled and skinny is fine in that world, but any fat is not.
Julia K, I was going to say the exact same thing. Does this mean committing a heist would be easier for middle-aged women because no one would see them or ever expect/suspect until it was long over? Just a thought.
She was ok in Mare and made effort to learn unusual accent – has already received Emmy for outstanding lead in limited series. Comparing her performance to other 40-ish actresses who are not portrayed with their usual glam, think that Mariah Carey’s role as social worker in Precious and Jennifer Aniston in Cake were both more impactful. As for having more cop shows – no thanks, that’s partly to blame for mass incarceration.
Society tends to frighten people as to what being over a certain age might be like. I’m sure most people are surprised (barring some kind of terrible health issue or any kind of tragedy like being in a car accident or losing a child) that the actual age (the actual number) never turns out as bad as you thought it was going to be. So I think her comments about age make sense even if it maybe gets worse when someone is 70 and has more health problems.
Sometimes I’ve seen 16 year olds afraid of being “old” like 25. This seems to continue on like that each decade until maybe you hit what actually IS old and then you start to care about other more important things in life (i.e see Linda Evans and when she talks about age). So I can see how she’d be surprised that she’d be viewed as still someone to pay attention to. The way people talk about age when you’re in the transitional periods of life is kind of funny. When you see 22 year olds freaking out, you know something is wrong with what the media tells people about age.