Throughout her career, Kate Winslet has often called out body-shaming in Hollywood. And in her most recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, she recalled being called out on the set of her upcoming movie Lee for her “belly rolls.”
Kate explained that she had stopped exercising altogether right before filming Lee so that her body would look softer. She said, “There’s a bit where Lee’s sitting on a bench in a bikini… And one of the crew came up between takes and said: ‘You might want to sit up straighter.’ So you can’t see my belly rolls? Not on your life! It was deliberate, you know?”
“I take pride in it because it is my life on my face, and that matters. It wouldn’t occur to me to cover that up,” she added about showing her authentic self on screen.
“I think people know better than to say, ‘You might wanna do something about those wrinkles’,” she continued. “I’m more comfortable in myself as each year passes. It enables me to allow the opinions of others to evaporate.”
In the past, Kate has been extremely vocal about body image and the importance of showcasing authentic bodies in media. In 2015, she even stipulated in her contract with L’Oreal that her Lancôme ads not be retouched. “I do think we have a responsibility to the younger generation of women. I would always want to be telling the truth about who I am to that generation because they’ve got to have strong leaders,” she said.
And in 2022, she fought back at the critics who claimed she was “too fat” in Titanic when it was released in 1997. “Apparently I was too fat,” she said on the Happy Sad Confused podcast. “Why were they so mean to me? They were so mean. I wasn’t even fucking fat. I would have said to journalists, I would have responded, I would have said, ‘Don’t you dare treat me like this. I’m a young woman, my body is changing, I’m figuring it out, I’m deeply insecure, I’m terrified, don’t make this any harder than it already is.’ That’s bullying, you know, and actually borderline abusive, I would say.”
Read Kate’s whole Harper’s Bazaar interview here.
