Maybe Kate Winslet is enjoying the benefit of hindsight, or she simply doesn’t have a movie with Woody Allen or Roman Polanski to promote, but the actress is no longer saying it was “extraordinary” to work with the legendary but controversial directors.
“It’s like, what the (expletive) was I doing working with Woody Allen and Roman Polanski,” Winslet said in a new interview with Vanity Fair.
The Oscar winner, 44, was responding to a question about whether the #MeToo movement had any impact on how she views the way women are depicted in movies. Dropping more f-bombs, Winslet mentioned “Ammomite,” the new film she is currently promoting, before saying, “Life is (expletive) short and I’d like to do my best when it comes to setting a decent example to younger women. We’re handing them a pretty (expletive)-up world, so I’d like to do my bit in having some proper integrity.”
Winslet then addressed Allen, 84, and and Polanski, 87, who have both faced allegations involving the sexual assault of minors. “It’s unbelievable to me now,” she said, “how those men were held in such high regard, so widely in the film industry and for as long as they were.
“It’s (expletive) disgraceful,” Winslet said. “And I have to take responsibility for the fact that I worked with them both. I can’t turn back the clock. I’m grappling with those regrets but what do we have if we aren’t able to just be (expletive) truthful about all of it?”
Winslet’s position on Allen is markedly different from another of the director’s famous female stars. Scarlett Johansson took the unpopular position of defending Allen in a 2019 interview.
“How do I feel about Woody Allen?” asked Johansson, who has starred in three of his films, including the acclaimed “Match Point.” “I love Woody. I believe him, and I would work with him anytime.”
Winslet, incidentally, was offered Johansson’s role in “Match Point.” She told Variety in 2017 she had to turn down the role for scheduling reasons. At the time, she said she feared she might never have another chance to work with Allen again.
In 2017, after he cast her in “Wonder Wheel,” she spoke about the director in a much more favorable light while promoting the film. The New York Times asked her whether the allegations against him had given her “pause.” Allen’s adopted daughter, Dylan Farrow, accused Allen of molesting her in the early 1990s when she was 7. Allen has vehemently denied her accusation over the years.
“Of course one thinks about it,” Winslet told the New York Times. “But at the same time, I didn’t know Woody and I don’t know anything about that family. As the actor in the film, you just have to step away and say, I don’t know anything, really, and whether any of it is true or false. Having thought it all through, you put it to one side and just work with the person.
“Woody Allen is an incredible director. So is Roman Polanski,” Winslet said. “I had an extraordinary working experience with both of those men, and that’s the truth.”
For decades, the cultural conversations about Allen and Polanski focused on their work, not on concerns about their relationships with under-aged girls. Polanski pleaded guilty in 1977 to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl. In recent years, four more women have come forward to accuse Polanski of abusing them when they were teenagers or young girls. Winslet worked with the “Rosemary’s Baby” director on the 2011 film, “Carnage.”
A month after Winslet’s September 2017 New York Times interview, the conversation about the directors changed dramatically after the New York Times and Allen’s son, Ronan Farrow, writing for the New Yorker, published their landmark investigative stories about Harvey Weinstein.
The Weinstein allegations hit just as Winslet was in the thick of promoting “Wonder Wheel,” in which she plays a deeply troubled housewife in 1950s Coney Island. At one point, there had been talk about Winslet giving another Oscar-worthy performance, with Allen’s defenders saying that he had written another of his supposedly great roles for women for her.
But with the Weinstein allegations, Winslet soon faced backlash for working with Allen. By the time she spoke to Variety in October 2017, she was on the defensive for her earlier comments to the New York Times about the “extraordinary” time she had working with him.
“We’re always as actors going to say the wrong thing,” she said. “I think it’s better to respectfully step away from the discussion.”
