“I’m a very open book. I don’t believe in hiding emotion”

Kate Winslet, star of a new Woody Allen film and a mountain adventure with Idris Elba, talks to Melena Ryzik about the challenges, terrors and delights of each role

Kate Winslet is the type to take her work home with her. The actress has two films coming out this year, and making them has haunted her nights.

After filming The Mountain Between Us in which she and Idris Elba play strangers stranded on an icy, desolate mountain range when their plane crashes, “I would have panic dreams about my children being trapped under ice,” she says, nightmares that are just now subsiding. And for different reasons, she also lost sleep shooting Woody Allen’s Wonder Wheel, set in 1950s Coney Island, in which Winslet is caught in an unfulfilling marriage and a dead-end job as a waitress in amusement park. Enter mobsters, and Justin Timberlake as a charismatic lifeguard. “It’s a character who really, truly not just unravels, but becomes so utterly undone by what happens to her during the course of the story,” Winslet says.

From Wonder Wheel she went right into The Mountain Between Us, directed by Hany Abu-assad and shot in the mountains of Western Canada. “We would fly up in helicopters to work every day,” she says. “We were very, very high up” – about 10,000 feet – “and very, very cold” – 36 degrees below zero. To Winslet, that was the appeal.

“There’s a certain sense of satisfaction after having had three children and being 41 years old, and actually feeling probably fitter and stronger than ever,” she says. “It was like, I can put some of that physical strength to good use.”

Winslet speaks about the terror and inspiration of working with Allen, the “acting pills” she and Elba took, and career longevity. These are edited excerpts from the conversation. I’m much more taken by an extreme set of circumstances 0 Kate Winslet at the Baftas in 2016, top left; in new Woody Allen film Wonder Wheel, top right; in Mountain Between Us, above than an easy, comfortable route. I like a challenge, and it’s been a long time since I’ve done a film that required such a level of physical exertion and stamina and commitment — and also overcoming a certain degree of fear every single day. Plus, I’m a much more cold than hot sort of person. If a script says, “It’s a sweltering hot day on a beach in Tahiti,” I’m less interested. We would go into work and there would be six different scenarios, based on whether the helicopters could fly that day, based on the weather – howling gale, a blizzard. It was bitterly cold. It would take me 45 minutes to dress in the morning, clever layers under those costumes, so we didn’t look like Michelin men. We were in full survival mode.

“It was an extraordinary part, that I could not believe he [Woody Allen] was asking me to play, so just the flattery of being offered the role was enough”