Kate Winslet says she wishes she’d had intimacy coordinators at start of her career
Kate Winslet has welcomed the rise of intimacy coordinators on film and television sets, saying that throughout her career she would have appreciated their presence “every single time I had to do a love scene or be partially naked or even a kissing scene”.
The Oscar-winning actor, 48, is currently starring as the dictator of a crumbling authoritarian regime in a fictional European country in HBO’s The Regime.
Speaking to The New York Times Magazine, Winslet expressed relief that younger actors no longer have to accept the same norms that she dealt with at the start of her career.
“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,” Winslet said. “It would have been nice to have had someone in my corner, because I always had to stand up for myself.”
She added that there were several times in her career when she’d wanted to take a stand but felt like she was unable to, giving examples such as: “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.”
Winslet explained that having somebody else to advocate for her needs would have helped, as she feared becoming branded as difficult to work with. “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,” she said. “So learning to have a voice for oneself in those environments was very, very hard.”
She went on to say that, looking back at her early career, she often felt she purposefully didn’t speak up as a defence mechanism against criticism. “I was already experiencing huge amounts of judgment, persecution, all this bullying,” she pointed out. “People can call me fat. They can call me what they want. But they certainly cannot say that I complained and I behaved badly. Over my dead body.”
She suggested that being outspoken would have harmed her reputation. “I would not have known how to do that without people in power turning around and saying, ‘Oh, Jesus Christ, you know, her again, that complainer,’” Winslet told the magazine. “I would rather suffer in silence than ever let that happen to me, even still today.”
