On a recent episode of the Team Deakins podcast, Kate Winslet talked about her debut role in Peter Jackson’s 1994 drama thriller Heavenly Creatures. The Oscar winner and Melanie Lynskey star in this film about two teenagers who share a dangerously obsessive friendship. When asked how much of herself she reflected in the role of Juliet, Winslet revealed that her “first intimate experiences” as a teenager were “with girls,” which helped her understand the “really strong connections” at the heart of the film.
“I’m going to share something I’ve never shared before. Some of my first intimate experiences as a teenager were actually with girls,” Winslet said. “I kissed a few girls and a few boys, but I didn’t really evolve in either direction.”
She added: “At that stage in my life, I was definitely curious, and I think there was something that really made me understand the really strong connection that these two women had. I was immediately sucked into the vortex of the world that they were in, and that obviously took a terrible toll on them, and they had a lot of anxiety and vulnerability.”
Winslet later explained that although she “didn’t really understand” the dark elements of the film, she empathized with the deep personal connections a person can form when they are young and “vulnerable.”
“Heavenly Creatures” became Winslet’s breakthrough film. She told Team Deakins that she had “never had a script in her hands” before auditioning for the film. It was also Jackson’s first foray into drama. Before directing “Heavenly Creatures,” his directorial work included horror films such as “Bad Taste” and “Dead Alive,” and the dark comedy “Meet the Feebles.”
A few years after Heavenly Creatures, Winslet starred in Sense and Sensibility, Jude, Hamlet, and in 1997, Titanic.
