Despite the many corseted, period films in which she's appeared, Kate Winslet is not a buttoned-up kind of person. Walking into a room in New York City's Crosby Hotel last week to do press for her new film, A Little Chaos, in theaters tomorrow, the actress immediately launched into a commentary on the odd art on the wall (a framed 18th century dress that seems too big for a child, but too small for a woman?), before telling us she had just chomped her way through an entire interview with some "poor journalist" because she'd been starving. In person, she almost glows—her skin has that luminescent quality you only see in ads and she has the kind of personality that puts an entire room at ease, dropping F-bombs and self-deprecating remarks intermittently, while charming everyone with that buttery English accent.
Winslet brought this same quality to her role of Sabine de Barra. In Alan Rickman's A Little Chaos, the Oscar winner plays a widowed gardener, whose unconventional (some might say chaotic) approach to green thumbery earns her the job of building one of King Louis XIV's massive landscapes at Versailles. She does not fit in at court (she's not quite used to all the pomp, circumstance, or blatant adultery), but wins favor with everyone by just being herself—an approach, she says, Winslet takes in real life as well. "Being on red carpets and going to the Academy Awards, it's an overwhelming experience for anybody," she says. "As the years go by you do realize that people are just people, it doesn't matter if you're the king, the queen, or a really famous actor or musician. There's always a person in there at the end of the day."
"I always try to be myself," she continues. "I think that makes a difference too. Because often people in those situations are very on show and so they're the ones that have to keep up the image and appear to be that person—what everyone expects them to be. And I know what that feels like. So I quite like being in the situation where I might be able to say a few cheeky little things that will totally make the person relax."
And she has a few tactics she likes to employ: "I used to have a trick when I was a smoker. I used to sit down and then I'd pull out my roll-up cigarettes, which was my little quirky thing I used to do, and I would visibly see people go [phew], and they would just relax, like 'Oh, she's normal'...I haven't smoked for quite a long time now, so that's gone. But what I do have in its place is a pencil case," Winslet says. "It's yellow fabric and it's got a little cartoon figure on it, and it just says 'Poo' and this person is squatting. So that's my relaxation tool. Out comes the poo pencil case and everyone just goes 'sigh.' And they all relax. It's a nice way of just making it feel like you're all in it together; everyone is on the same page."
She employed a similar tactic when it came to telling director Alan Rickman—whom she starred opposite 20 years ago in Sense and Sensibility, the film that earned the then-19-year-old actress her first Oscar nomination—that she was pregnant. Except this time she lightened the mood with a boob joke. "I told him on the second day of filming," she says. "I called him into the trailer and I said 'Okay, um, I really don't know how to say this. I'm just going to say it really quickly. I'm pregnant' and he went '…Right,' Winslet says, doing a spot-on Alan-Rickman/Severus Snape impression.
"And I went 'But look, it's completely fine, look, I'm totally fine, absolutely with it. Nothing to worry about. We're just going to carry on. You just might have to accept that my boobs are going to get massive," Winslet says. "He was like, 'Think I can cope with that.'"
"But it was absolutely fine. In the first trimester, women on the whole don't really like telling people until that glorious 12-week mark, which I wasn't [at]. It was earlier than that. But I don't like fuss, you know, and I don't like being wrapped in cotton wool and all that stuff. So I just didn't want people to be making a fuss of me. And you know, when women are pregnant, it doesn't mean you stop doing things, it doesn't mean you sit at home and put your feet up. You just carry on, don't you? I mean, you just get on with it, you really do. So that was what I did."
The only problem, Winslet explains, was, in fact, the boobs. Because Sabine, naturally, had to wear a corset. "I was really excited about putting the corset on for about a day," she says. "And then I was like 'Oh my God.' And...as I was getting bigger, you know, it was just getting kind of doughy...[like] you get at the beginning of a pregnancy; as I was getting doughier, we were shooting, I really would dread it, like 'Ugh, I have to put the corset on.' I'm normally extremely uncomplaining. The lucky thing for me, I mean we would have done this anyway, the corset from that period actually starts right on your navel, and of course the pregnancy is like, at that stage, it's a good 10 inches below there, so that was not an issue at all. No, it really was what to do with the boobs."
A question we ask ourselves all the time, Kate.
