Nobody had as much experience as her on set.
In the survival thriller The Mountain Between Us, Kate Winslet plays Alex, a gutsy photographer, opposite Idris Elba's play-it-safe doctor Ben, stranded after a plane crash and relying on each other to survive. For Winslet, the character felt familiar, and she related to Alex with ease.
Kate Winslet and Idris Elba star in 'The Mountain Between Us'
"She acts in the exact same way I think I would have done," she says. "From quite a young age, I stood up for myself and strutted out into the world and carved my own path. And I really responded to that in Alex. She has that similar sense of self-possession and she's extremely self-sufficient."
The film was shot in the wilderness, which brought its own challenges to the production team. "It was very remote up there," Winslet says. "But we had an amazing group of mountain-safety people who'd been scouting the area for the six months at high altitude. They knew exactly what was going on underneath the drifts of snow, where to walk and where not to walk."
But she says that being in the mountains wasn't the trickiest thing about the shoot. "The most difficult part was being dragged soaking wet through the cold snow," Winslet says. "But my biggest fear was not actually getting pneumonia. It was Idris treading on my hair. I didn't want to ruin a take by going, 'Argh, he's stepping on my hair!' And however hard it looks for me, it was harder for Idris to anchor his feet on the ice. It was freezing cold, he was also soaking wet, and I weigh a ton because all those clothes I'm wearing are soaked through."
Watch the trailer for 'The Mountain Between Us' here:
And then there was the scene in which they had to take off those wet clothes. "Yes, we got naked," Winslet laughs, "but Idris asked me to keep my socks on. I thought he didn't like feet, but it is the opposite, Idris loves feet!"
Although as things needed to turn sexy, director Hany Abu-Assad suddenly got nervous about it. "I had to get quite bossy," Winslet says. "I've done quite a lot of these scenes before, and I thought, 'We are never going to get this done.' Idris was a bit nervous too and everything was moving a bit slowly so I just said, 'Okay boys, this is what we are going to do,' and we just got on with it!"
More: Kate Winslet talks about Idris Elba's nervousness during filming
Of course, Winslet also played some steamy scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio 20 years ago on the set of Titanic. "But Leo and I never fancied each other," she admits. "I know that's really annoying to hear. Sorry, but we really never did."
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