Kate Winslet recently covered Porter, net-a-porter.com’s in-house digital magazine. Kate is promoting Lee, the biopic she did about photographer Lee Miller. That’s coming out later this year. She’s also promoting HBO’s The Regime, which looks soooo good. Kate plays a strangely-accented despot of a fictional European country and Kate looks like she’s turned in one of her funniest and weirdest performances ever. After Mare of Easttown, I might even argue that Kate has turned into one of the best television actresses working today. Anyway, Kate chatted with Porter about fame, work, her kids and more. Some highlights:

What she took from playing Lee Miller. “What I took from her is that absolute freedom she has from her body and her delight in her own physical self. I think that’s very unusual of historical female figures that we know of – and it’s very unusual of women today….What [Miller] stands for in representing truth and justice… [someone] who was powerful emotionally and charismatic and sexy and brilliantly skilled at her job and had a way of connecting with people – I am inspired by that. We live in a time as women where we just crave that from other women. #MeToo lit a fire inside so many of us, collectively, in terms of [what we] want to leave behind and what we want to say for ourselves.”

On ‘The Regime’: “I can’t even tell you about the out-takes! I knew that I could push the envelope in terms of creative choices,” she says of Elena’s hilariously cloying accent and long acrylic nails, “because it is meant to be absurd. I wanted to do as many things as I could to let the audience know that you should not take this woman seriously”. [Her character] Elena, who “has huge issues with the world and within herself, due to a bizarre childhood”, addresses the nation as “my loves”, regularly broadcasts herself singing (Winslet, a typically lovely singer, deliberately out of tune), and keeps her dead father in a glass coffin in the basement. “It’s just so repulsive.”

The changes in the industry: “It’s different now. Mia is very much her own person. [Young women now] know how to use their voice.” She recalls her blockbuster breakthrough Titanic coming out when she was 22. “I felt like I had to look a certain way, or be a certain thing, and because media intrusion was so significant at that time, my life was quite unpleasant. Journalists would always say, ‘After Titanic, you could have done anything and yet you chose to do these small things’… and I was like, ‘Yeah, you bet your f–kin’ life I did! Because, guess what, being famous was horrible.’ I was grateful, of course. I was in my early twenties, and I was able to get a flat. But I didn’t want to be followed literally feeding the ducks.”

How she feels about fame now: “Oh, it’s such a ridiculous word! I wear it really lightly. It’s not a burden, any of it. [Titanic] continues to bring people huge amounts of joy. The only time I am like, ‘Oh god, hide’, is if we are on a boat somewhere.” I ask whether she’s seen the meme captioned, ‘Find yourself someone who looks at you the way Leo looks at Kate’. She snorts with laughter. No. “[He’s looking at me like that because] he just knows I can see right through it all. I think when you experience something so seismic, so young… we really went through that together.”

[From Porter]

Kate and Leo still ride for each other, they still cite one another as their favorite costars and they really did bond. It’s nice that they still get along and sort of honor what that film meant to millions of people. As for what Kate says about the changes in the industry… it’s weird because in some ways, I do think it’s probably “easier” on her daughter Mia to operate in the industry as a young woman with her own agency, and the ability to stand up for herself and be heard. In other ways, I imagine it’s far, far worse for young, famous women – the attention they get, the social media sh-t, and the paparazzi and expectations and all of that.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of Porter/net-a-porter.com.