This Was Kate Winslet’s Reaction to Being Told to Hide ‘Belly Rolls’ on Film Set

Speaking with Harper’s Bazaar UK for a new cover story, Winslet opened up about one moment that’s stuck with her from the film shoot for Lee, her upcoming World War II film about the British Vogue model-turned-photojournalist who unexpectedly found herself documenting the front line.

“There’s a bit where Lee’s sitting on a bench in a bikini,” Winslet recalled. “And one of the crew came up between takes and said: ‘You might want to sit up straighter.'”

“So you can’t see my belly rolls?” Winslet says she shot back. “Not on your life! It was deliberate, you know?”

In fact, it was so deliberate, Winslet told the magazine she stopped exercising altogether for an authentically softer look.

Looking authentic is for more than just Winslet’s film roles. It means something to her for her everyday life, too. The Titanic star said she’s determined to age naturally, and has no fear about showing that on the big screen.

“I take pride in it,” she said of presenting exactly how she looks, “because it is my life on my face, and that matters. It wouldn’t occur to me to cover that up.”

The 48-year-old is also not inclined to consider Botox or any other types of surgeries or injections, as many other people her age and younger in Hollywood have done.

“I think people know better than to say, ‘You might wanna do something about those wrinkles,'” she said in the interview. “I’m more comfortable in myself as each year passes. It enables me to allow the opinions of others to evaporate.”

That said, she’s been a staunch advocate of authenticity in pictures of her, and not afraid to share her own opinions about it publicly. All the way back to 2003, she called out a GQ cover, as noted by Deadline, for altering her body.

“I do not look like that and more importantly I don’t desire to look like that,” she said of the cover at the time. “I actually have a Polaroid that the photographer gave me on the day of the shoot … I can tell you they’ve reduced the size of my legs by about a third. For my money it looks pretty good the way it was taken.”

More than a decade later, in 2015, Winslet shared a stipulation in her contract with L’Oreal that her appearance was never to be altered digitally, calling it a “responsibility to the younger generation of women.”

“I would always want to be telling the truth about who I am to that generation because they’ve got to have strong leaders,” she explained.

Winslet has previously been open about struggling with an eating disorder after years of public scrutiny about the size of her body. That’s something she’s grateful to see changing.

“I do feel a huge sense of relief that women are so much more accepting of themselves and refusing to be judged,” she told Harper’s Bazaar UK. “We waste so much time being down on ourselves and I’m just not doing it ever again.”