The Regime star Kate Winslet reveals why she left ‘flirtatious’ accent voicemails to producer

Virgin Radio

6 Jun 2024, 16:06

Award-winning actress Kate Winslet has opened up about why she felt the need to send ‘flirtatious’ sounding audio messages to the executive producer in preparation for her role in HBO's The Regime.

Speaking about portraying her latest character Chancellor Elena Vernham in the satirical drama, the star told The Regime FYC panel at an event in Los Angeles: "It never made sense to me to speak like myself. I didn't quite know what that meant, or what I was going to do about it. I just knew that I had to find something that didn't feel too close to me."

The Mare of Easttown star appears alongside Matthias Schoenaerts, Guillaume Gallienne, Andrea Riseborough, Martha Plimpton and Hugh Grant in the drama and plays the 'corrupt authoritarian ruler' in the fictional European country.

The Titanic star tested out her new voice on executive producer and director Jessica Hobbs prior to launching it on fellow executive producer and director Stephen Frears. She said: "I knew he was just going to have an opinion, and once it was out of his mouth, I wouldn't be able to unhear it, and so I shared it with Jess [Hobbs], who was very positive in her response.

"So I sat Stephen down [and tried out the voice]. 'Do you see if I just maybe did that? And then a little bit and talk to you slightly flirtatiously, I could probably get you to do anything... Luckily, he was laughing. He looked at me, and he said, 'You've got to do that for six months.'"

Discussing her acting method and the character's unique voice and accent, she said that it wasn't appreciated at home and her family gave her the feedback: "Don't do that. It's actually made my ears bleed."

On perfecting her Delaware Country accent for her other HBO show Mare of Easttown, she said previously: "It's interesting, because I realise that as I was learning the dialect it was definitely affecting the emotional register of the voice I was finding for Mare.

"Because she was born there, she was raised there, I had to do it pretty darn well," she continued. "It was a little crazy-making, I'm not going to pretend it wasn't.

"I didn't want to create a voice, I wanted to create a person and the voice had to just be secondary to that. So for me, the goal and the hardest part of all of it was doing it and doing it well enough that it just sort of disappears and you don't then hear me doing it," she added, before quipping, "It's pretty hard not to hear a Delco dialect though, let me tell you."

The Avatar: The Way of Water star told our Chris on the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with webuyanycar: “It is completely bonkers. It is a satirical drama set within an autocratic regime in a fictional country somewhere in Central Europe, and I play this totally paranoid, insecure, slightly delusional... actually very delusional... female dictator of this small nation.

"She's allergic to mould, she doesn't really know how to communicate with people anymore. And yet she just believes that everybody loves her. So she's just bonkers."

The Holiday star added: “There are things that happen in this show that are so bonkers, that all you can do is laugh your head off. They go on a diet of mud at one point, they just eat soil for a whole episode.”