Since the ’90s, Kate Winslet has been a chameleonic heroine. Across every possible genre, time period, and degree of prestige, she’s breathed humanity into the most complex characters.

It’s also been said that she’s an on-set quarterback of sorts. “There’s always this joke,” she says with a laugh, “the other actors will [wonder] what’s happening, and someone will go, ‘Just ask Kate.’”

Off-screen, she’s one of Hollywood’s fiercest advocates for women in film.

This year, she’s adopting another title. Less than 48 hours before our Sunday morning Zoom call, she wrapped post-production for Goodbye June, her hyper-personal directorial debut. True to form, she stars, directs, and produces the film, which comes to Netflix on Christmas Eve.

“When I was younger, in my 20s and 30s, I wouldn’t say that I ever really considered being a director,” she admits. But for years, Winslet’s colleagues noticed that she “thought like a director.”

It started in 2005 on the set of Little Children, when director Todd Field invited a kind of collaboration that she hadn’t experienced before. “Todd really included me in his creative process,” she recalls. “It was the first time I felt genuinely trusted to share a thought about how a scene might look or feel with a director.”

Since her debut in Peter Jackson’s 1994 true crime drama Heavenly Creatures, Winslet has seldom gone more than one year without appearing in a film. With an Academy Award, five BAFTAs, two Emmy Awards, a Grammy, and five Golden Globe Awards (she’s one award away from EGOT status), her presence brings a level of consideration and depth to everything she touches. That still didn’t assuage her doubts about directing.

“It’s not a foregone conclusion that just because I’ve been doing this job for 33 years, that I would know how to be a director,” she says. “I’ve been directed for 33 years, and I’ve been on hundreds of film sets, but it’s quite another thing to know how to really put a film together as a director.”

But then Joe Anders, her 21-year-old son with director Sam Mendes, presented her with Goodbye June, a script he had written for a screenwriting course.

The premise was inspired by Winslet’s own experience losing her mother to ovarian cancer in 2017. “He was encouraged by a wonderful tutor to write about something that he knew,” she says. “Whilst it is not autobiographical in any way, [Anders] took the scenario that he had been around when my own mother passed away.”

She recognized the script’s potential instantly. “It was very clear that it was a screenplay that could be a film,” she says. “I could see that right away. And I was going to produce it because I had been producing things for a while.” Even though Winslet executive-produced Mare of Easttown and The Regime, it was in 2022 that she earned her first feature producer credit for Lee, an epic-yet-intimate biopic of Second World War photographer Lee Miller. On top of starring, Winslet poured herself into every facet of the film to get it made, from casting to funding to using a replica of Miller’s Rolleiflex camera and actually taking photos on set.

But for Winslet, Goodbye June was different. As Anders worked on drafts of the script and prepared to send it to potential directors, she experienced an urge she had never felt before—she needed to direct this film. “I suddenly realized I just didn’t want to let it go.”

Production was intimate. In 35 days, Goodbye June was shot with a tight crew and a modest budget. This only served the film for the better. “I knew the smallness and the intimacy of the experience would contribute to the intimacy of what we all had to do,” she says.

Most scenes in Goodbye June take place in a London hospital. Winslet, Toni Collette, Johnny Flynn, and Andrea Riseborough play siblings who come together as their mother (Helen Mirren) nears the end of her life and their father (Timothy Spall) spirals.

Though set around Christmas, it skirts the saccharinity that often befalls holiday films. There is warmth, yes, but there are also the clenched jaws, side eyes, passive aggressive tones, and sterile overhead lighting that one would expect in such a scenario.

Winslet went the extra mile to create a sense of realism. The camera team were quietly able to step away when using locked off shots, so that the actors could truly be alone with one another for more intimate scenes. She even opted out of using overhead boom mics (which she calls a “horrible distraction”).

“The thing I really loved more than anything was doing the things for the actors that I wish I could have experienced myself as an actor,” she says.

The magic of the movie is in how natural it all feels. In Winslet’s hands, extraordinary characters feel deeply human and ordinary people are imbued with labyrinthine nuance. This is Winslet’s signature.

“The thing I really loved more than anything was doing the things for the actors that I wish I could have experienced myself as an actor.”

In a viral clip from last year, Winslet’s The Holiday co-star Jack Black was asked about his favourite scene partner. Without missing a beat, he named Winslet. “When you look in her eyes, she’s like, really present,” he explained. This sense of presence is palpable whether she’s on camera or behind the lens.

Movie stars of Winslet’s calibre tend to be inherently impenetrable and deeply unknowable. She has always chafed against this idea. But she hasn’t always been rewarded for it.

“The media was very cruel when I was in my 20s,” she recalls. “To me, but not just to me. They got a lot wrong for a lot of young women who were in the public eye at that time, in a way that I think is absolutely shameful. To say [those experiences] made me stronger is a very thinly veiled way of describing the impact that that time in my life had on me. What it really did was it taught me how to focus and prioritize the things that matter.”

Today, she refuses to read reviews of her work and steers clear of social media. “I have no idea what comments may or may not be made about me in the internet space,” she says. “That’s an extraordinary thing, if you think about that. That’s actually how I survive.”

Her children appear to be adopting similar approaches to stardom. On top of screenwriting, Anders is a budding actor. While Goodbye June was in production, he was filming Netflix’s upcoming East of Eden adaptation alongside Florence Pugh and Mike Faist. This year, Winslet’s daughter, Mia Threapleton, landed her first starring feature role in Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme. Like Winslet, neither of them have public social media accounts.

When they were teenagers, it was a rule. Now, it’s a choice. Initially, she encouraged this to give them a shot at entering the industry on their own terms. “I intuitively felt, from when they were teenagers, that there was a very strong possibility that they would want to go into the same business,” she recalls. “Making that decision was partly to do with wanting them to preserve their anonymity so that if they chose to [act], hopefully they could somehow find their way in on their own terms, with a degree of anonymity around them. I can say that they have both done that. That’s been extraordinary.”

Now, as she balances projects from Goodbye June to the upcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash, she’s passing that same sense of honesty and self- determination to the next generation—her children. In real life, that’s the legacy she’s building.

Feature image by courtesy of Alexi Lubomirski / Trunk Archive.

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