Kate Winslet reveals plans for an ‘incredible’ 50th birthday

Virgin Radio

11 Apr 2024, 08:05

Kate Winslet is reaching a big birthday next year, and she has told Chris Evans how she plans to celebrate.

The Oscar-winning actor joined the Chris Evans Breakfast Show with webuyanycar to talk about her new political-satire miniseries, The Regime, when the conversation turned to an upcoming milestone. 

“I'm going to be 50 next year,” Kate - who is currently 48 - told Chris. 

“I don't want any presents,” she revealed. 

“Here's my thing, I want to do 50 incredible things for 50. But they have to be made up of acts of kindness, physical feats and probably something like… I don't know… trying foods I've never tried before. Something like that.”

The Titanic star added: “We don't need to keep being given presents do we? Do things, put nice things into the world.”

Chris suggested: “You can always do that counting down from birthday eve, 50 days out and you can do 1k, 2k, 3k, and you get up to 50 kilometres.”

Kate responded: “No, you can do that! You can do that, and I'll do something else. I'll have 50 croissants instead. How about that?”

The acting star plays the lead role in The Regime, which is a satirical drama set within an autocratic regime in a fictional country in Central Europe. Speaking about the “full six-month shoot", she said: “Sometimes television does take a very long time, more time than film, which I love because you can really get so into it and dig right in and build these great relationships with the other actors. And that's where we were extremely lucky, actually on The Regime -  and Mare of Easttown, too - but on The Regime, we had so many wonderful British actors, and it was just such a laugh to spend time with those people every day. And there's something about the British spirit of just, when the chips are down, you’ve just got to keep going. 

“And when you feel overloaded, and there's just so many pages of dialogue and how you're going to cope, you also huddle around a bit terrified and run your lines quickly and pray that you're gonna do something decent in that day. And there's that sense of, kind of, 'If we can just get to coffee break and then we can have a jammie dodger, and we'll just move on. So I loved being in that world for six months. It was really fantastic.”

Kate plays Elena Vernham, a “very delusional female dictator” in the new show. Of her character, she told Chris: “She had a rather bizarre relationship with her father, who was also a politician. And so that thing of searching for approval the whole time and feeling that she had to win his love in some way by doing something great, it still haunts her to the extent that even though her father is deceased, and has been for one year, she's kept his corpse in a glass coffin, and she goes downstairs and has little chats with daddy. 

“So that was a bit of a way in for me, that of a lot of who she was rested in that very bizarre backstory of what kind of a weird childhood she must have had, and why she has become the way she has become, and why she sounds the way she does and interacts with people in this very strange, twisted way.”

Find out about Kate holding her breath underwater for over SEVEN MINUTES here.

The Regime is out now on Sky Atlantic and NOW. 

For more great interviews listen to The Chris Evans Breakfast Show with webuyanycar weekdays from 6:30am on Virgin Radio, or catch up on-demand here.