Kate Winslet is one of Oscar’s most nominated actresses … who’s never won. As it stands, the British beauty’s scored five noms, for Best Actress and Best Supporting, but has yet to be called to the podium.
Maybe this is the year her luck will change — she has not one but two award-caliber performances coming up, in Revolutionary Road, directed by her husband, Sam Mendes, and reuniting her with her Titanic leading man Leonardo DiCaprio, and in the Holocaust drama The Reader, directed by Oscar nominee Stephen Daldry and co-starring Ralph Fiennes and German actor David Kross as his younger incarnation.
In the latter, based on a semiautobiographical best-seller, she’s Hanna Schmitz, a former concentration camp guard who takes up with a high schooler to form a bond that turns out to be life-changing for both of them. Moviefone talked with Winslet about how she prepped her co-star for sex scenes, what she thinks of her Nazi character … and that ever-elusive Oscar.
1. There’s a lot of nudity in this film; you’re known for being comfortable with nudity in your movies. How do you actually prepare to do a scene like that?
Honestly, you exfoliate your ass; you starve yourself; you work out like a demon … Obviously, none of that’s true [laughs]. How do you prepare? You don’t really, you know, you don’t really prepare. How can you? I don’t know even what that means. For someone like [my character] Hanna, it was very important to me that she looked real, that she looked absolutely real. And so in fact, quite the opposite; I sort of unprepared, you know, I didn’t go working out like a lunatic or anything like that.
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