Media has played a major role in setting unrealistic body and beauty standards for women and men alike. And while most actors and actresses are used to having their faces and bodies regularly altered for the big screen, Kate Winslet had decided to stand up against it.
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Keeping it real
Winslet recently revealed that the director of the HBO series Mare of Easttown, Craig Zobel, offered to edit out a little bit of bulge in her belly during a sex scene. To which Winslet replied, ‘Don’t you dare!’
She didn’t just say no to editing out her belly from the sex scenes, she also rejected two promotional posters for the series because she believed that they had been heavily photoshopped. She told The New York Times:
They were like ‘Kate, really, you can’t,’ and I’m like ‘Guys, I know how many lines I have by the side of my eye, please put them all back.
Her character
The actress plays Marianne 'Mare' Sheehan, a detective in Pennsylvania who is investigating a local murder. Marianne, is an unglamorous middled-aged grandmother and Winslet wanted to keep the character as realistic as possible. She said:
Listen, I hope that in playing Mare as a middle-aged woman – I will be 46 in October – I guess that’s why people have connected with this character in the way that they have done because there are clearly no filters.
She’s a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from. I think we’re starved of that a bit.
The show was released in April this year, and has since received rave reviews. In fact, the season finale that aired on 30 May racked up a staggering four million viewers—making it the most-watched episode of any HBO original series on HBO Max.
