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Kate Winslet revealed she was encouraged to cover up her belly rolls during a swimsuit scene in her 2023 film, “Lee.”
“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,’” she told Harper’s Bazaar in a cover interview published Tuesday.
“‘So you can’t see my belly rolls? Not on your life!’” she recalled responding. “It was deliberate, you know?”
The 48-year-old actress said she strategically stopped working out before the film so her body would look softer for her role. In “Lee,” she portrayed the real-life American war journalist Lee Miller.
When asked by Harper’s Bazaar if she minded her body looking “less-than-perfect,” she responded, “The opposite.”
“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 explained.
Winslet has been a longtime advocate for body positivity and self-acceptance — despite the bullying she received as a child and a young adult.
In 2016, she spoke about the incessant bullying she received over her weight as a child while on the “Today” show.
“I was kind of bullied when I was younger, actually at school,” she remembered. “For being chubby [or], you know, I had girls who were envious of me because I was acting a little bit as a teenager.”
She later revealed she was cruelly called “Blubber” by her classmates.
In the years after “Titanic” shot her to global stardom, her weight fluctuation was a hot topic for the tabloids.
She made headlines in 2003 when she called out British GQ for editing her February cover to make her appear thinner, which the publication eventually admitted to doing. At the time, it was abnormal for a woman to make any sort of fuss over a magazine cover.
And in 2021, Winslet proudly revealed she instructed her “Mare of Easttown” director Craig Zobel to leave her body unedited during an intimate scene.
During her recent chat with Harper’s Bazaar, the “Reader” star said she thinks society is moving in a better direction regarding how they view women’s bodies.
“I do feel a huge sense of relief that women are so much more accepting of themselves and refusing to be judged,” she noted.
“Because I don’t know a single contemporary of mine who grew up seeing her mother looking in the mirror and saying: ‘I look nice!’”
“My mother never did: it was always, ‘Oh God, I don’t think I can wear this, do I look hippy, does my bum look big?’”
She added, “We waste so much time being down on ourselves and I’m just not doing it ever again.”
