Kate Winslet on Going Big With ‘The Regime,’ Those ‘Stupid’ James Cameron Feud Rumors and Getting ‘Beaten Up’ by Body-Shamers: ‘This S— Went on for Years’

variety.com:

Kate Winslet went to the London home of director Stephen Frears to discuss HBO’s political satire “The Regime.” She’d been cast in the role of Elena Vernham, a narcissistic European autocrat, and Frears had been pinpointed by the production as a potential director. “I was offered a cup of tea, which I then ended up making myself because he clearly had no intention of making the tea for me at all,” Winslet says. “In fact, he didn’t even seem to know where the cups were.” (The British use the phrase “Shall I be mother?” when offering to be in charge of the kettle at teatime, and Winslet, a mother of three, has some experience there.) Over the tea and some chocolate biscuits, she asked the director how he believed Elena should be played. “He said to me, ‘Well, it needs to be quite high,’” Winslet recalls. “And I didn’t have a fucking clue what he meant.

And as I walked away, I realized I totally knew. It was his way of saying, ‘Go big or go home.’” Mission accomplished: In the limited series “The Regime,” the actress’s third collaboration with HBO (after 2011’s “Mildred Pierce” and 2021’s “Mare of Easttown”), Winslet deploys a lisp, a blocky way of moving and a racing mind.

Elena, who can’t live up to her late autocratic father’s outsized reputation, has restructured her national government around her neuroses.

The series tracks her attempts to grow her power in the face of mass discontent, which she incrementally brings upon herself with blunder after blunder.