No laughing during the love scenes...
FILMING love scenes can be a fraught business, but Kate Winslet, who stars in the forthcoming blockbuster satirical drama The Regime, says her love scenes were such a blast that two crew were sent out of the room — for laughing.
Winslet, who won an Emmy for TV hit Mare Of Easttown, plays the crackers dictator of an imagined central European state, who has an affair with her soldier bodyguard Zubak (Belgian actor Matthias Schoenaerts) in the six-part show.
She said: ‘When we were shooting episode five, Elena and Zubak are having sex. And she’s screaming at him: “No biting, no biting!” Two people had to be sent out for laughing. One of them was Alwin Kuchler, our cinematographer, and one of the hair and make-up people.
‘That was actually kind of a problem because Matthias had all these tattoos, and as he got sweatier and sweatier they just kept sort of rubbing off on me. And I said: “This is really like I’ve got the newspaper printed on me.”’
The Regime, which also stars Andrea Riseborough and Hugh Grant, has been written by Succession’s Will Tracy and is directed by Stephen Frears. Tracy said that the concept had evolved after he read a biography of Ethiopia’s last emperor Haile Selassie. He said: ‘It’s almost like an Upstairs Downstairs, or a Downton Abbey, but instead of an English manor house, it’s an autocrat’s palace.’
In the show, dictator Elena keeps the embalmed body of her father in the palace basement, and goes down frequently to chat with him.
She also sings — hilariously off-key — in a bid to win the affection of her disgruntled people.
Winslet is very game with her woeful renditions of Santa Baby and If You Leave Me Now — and her costar Riseborough cracks: ‘Please God, let there be an album.’
The show, was filmed mostly on location in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, Austria; with some scenes shot in baroque rooms at Wentworth Woodhouse, near Rotherham.
It goes out in the US on March 3 and will be on Sky Max here in April.