You may not equate Kate Winslet with action-adventure, but the Oscar-winning British actress knows a thing or two about disaster films.
"I did Titanic, dude," she cracked during a press panel yesterday for her upcoming film, The Mountain Between Us. Winslet and Idris Elba star as Alex and Ben, two strangers who come together to battle the elements and fall in love when their chartered plane crashes on a snowy mountaintop. The star called it "a love story about survival."
Winslet revealed that her experience on Titanic has made her something of an expert on cold water plunges and icy temperatures, crucial given her new film's intense action scenes. For the drama's romantic storyline, however, she needed to turn only to her own real-life relationship.
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Some background: Winslet began dating her husband, Ned Rocknroll, in 2011 after a fire broke out at his uncle Richard Branson's home on Necker Island. As with The Mountain Between Us, a dangerous situation thrust two people together, and love blossomed.
"You can never judge a stranger," Winslet said when Refinery29 asked about her love scenes with Elba. "You can never guess what a stranger might say to you, how they might behave towards you. If these two characters hadn’t had moments of intimacy, how would they have the emotional strength to survive and to stay alive? Days go by where they don’t eat anything. They have to stick together, keep their moral up. It’s very unexpected how they start to gradually fall in love.
"There are moments of extreme tension in the early part of the film," she continued. "It feels really far away — the idea that this couple might actually fall in love because there’s so much stuff around them, emotional stuff that they both have. They’ve both got baggage. They’ve both got their situations back home. Somehow they break each other down, emotionally, in a way. It’s almost as though they become their true selves with each other in ways that they’ve perhaps never been before.
"One thing that I always loved about the story is that they go through this experience thinking that they’re one person and come out of it someone else entirely. They can never quite go back to what life once was. I think that’s a perfectly possible thing that can happen to people. I’ve seen it happen. I mean, when I met my husband, Ned, I felt that’s what happened to me, to be honest. I just knew it wasn’t going to be the way it had been before. It was something else now.
"I really feel that when you see that in a film, it’s incredibly inspiring. I loved that it was as surprising as it was when I read that sequence of scenes in the film. Even I didn’t see it coming when I first read the script."
Now, who's going to break the news to Leo?