Kate Winslet asked her ‘Mare of Easttown’ director not to edit out her belly in her sex scene

Kate Winslet has said that she did more prep work for her role in Mare of Easttown than she had for any other part that came before. Perhaps then, it’s not surprising that Winslet told her director, Craig Zobel, not to tinker with her performance too much in the editing suite. For example, when Mare bares her belly in a seriously steamy sex scene with author Richard Ryan (Guy Pearce), Winslet made sure that her real, natural “bulgy bit of belly” stayed on screen instead of ending up on the cutting room floor. When Zobel told her he'd smooth it out, Winslet replied “Don’t you dare!”

The same went for the promotional posters which were far too retouched for the actor’s liking — so she sent them back to be redone. “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,’” she told The New York Times.

Winslet, who played Mare dressed in worn flannels, ill-fitting jeans, and lumpy jackets (“they would stay in a rumpled up ball overnight,” she said. “We were not washing and drying and hanging those clothes. Never.”) wanted to do justice to her character by avoiding a glamorous promotional campaign for the series.

“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 told the Times. “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.” (We think we agree.)

“We’re so used to seeing this stuff airbrushed away,” said Winslet, who felt a responsibility both to her character and to audiences to show an example for what a “real” unfiltered human being looks like.

“What worries me is that faces are beautiful,” she told the Times. “Faces that change, that move, are beautiful faces, but we’ve stopped learning how to love those faces because we keep covering them up with filters now because of social media and anyone can photoshop themselves, and airbrush themselves, and so they do.”

"In general, I would say I feel for this generation because I don’t see it stopping, I don’t see or feel it changing, and that just makes me sad because I hope that they aren’t missing out on being present in real life and not reaching for unattainable ideals.”

With Mare, then, Winslet went in the opposite direction, messily wolfing down cheesesteaks (or at least the lookalike vegetarian version) on screen and showing her belly as it is. "I loved her marks and her scars and her faults and her flaws and the fact that she has no off switch, no stop button,” she said of the character, “She just knows ‘Go.’”

BEFORE YOU GO: Kate Winslet on how her ‘Mare of Easttown’ character became her alter ego

[video_embed id='2171943']BEFORE YOU GO: Kate Winslet on how her ‘Mare of Easttown’ character became her alter ego[/video_embed]