It would’ve been nice for Kate Winslet to have an intimacy coordinator back in the day
Kate Winslet wishes she had an intimacy coordinator "every single time I had to do a love scene or be partially naked or even a kissing scene"
The industry’s approach to the craft of intimate scenes is changing, and there are mixed feelings about it from veteran actors. Add Kate Winslet, whose breakthrough role in Titanic contained some significant nude and sex scenes, to those advocating for the practice of intimacy coordinators. “I would have benefited from an intimacy coordinator every single time I had to do a love scene or be partially naked or even a kissing scene,” she says in a New York Times profile. “It would have been nice to have had someone in my corner, because I always had to stand up for myself.”
To this day, Winslet typically “would rather suffer in silence” than be known as “that complainer” on set, so it sounds like she rarely stood up for herself, particularly as an up-and-coming starlet. But there are lots of things she wishes she could have said: “I don’t like that camera angle. I don’t want to stand here full-frontal nude. I don’t want this many people in the room. I want my dressing gown to be closer. Just little things like that,” she shares. “When you’re young, you’re so afraid of pissing people off or coming across as rude or pathetic because you might need those things. So learning to have a voice for oneself in those environments was very, very hard.”
If being thrown into the deep end (literally, when it comes to Titanic) helped The Regime star learn to stand up for herself, so did “experiencing huge amounts of judgment, persecution, all this bullying” from the media. (She reveals suffering from an eating disorder amidst the scrutiny of her early fame.) Now, as a seasoned professional, she’s not only in a position to protect herself, but others too. As both star and producer of Mare Of Easttown, Winslet apparently “sat in the trunk of a car where the then-19-year-old Angourie Rice would be filming a kissing scene” in order to “personally pass on notes from the director coming in through a radio.” That’s being the change you’d like to see in the world!