Kate Winslet left “flirtatious” voicemails for ‘The Regime’ producer and director.
Kate Winslet went above and beyond to perfect her ‘flirtatious’ accent
The 48-year-old actress plays fictional dictator Chancellor Elena Vernham in HBO’s new six part political satire, and she has revealed how she honed her accent to make sure she didn’t sound like herself for the role.
Appearing at an FYC panel this week, she said: “It never made sense to me to speak like myself.
“I didn’t quite know what that meant, or what I was going to do about it. I just knew that I had to find something that didn’t feel too close to me.”
Initially, Kate would experiment at home, but her family begged her not to and joked it “actually made their ears bleed”.
She then started to send voicemails to Jessica Hobbs, to build up her confidence before trying it out with Jessica’s co-producer and director Stephen Frear.
She explained: “I knew he was just going to have an opinion, and once it was out of his mouth, I wouldn’t be able to unhear it, and so I shared it with Jess [Hobbs], who was very positive in her response.
“So I sat Stephen down [and tried out the voice]. ‘Do you see if I just maybe did that? And then a little bit and talk to you slightly flirtatiously, I could probably get you to do anything…’
“Luckily, he was laughing. He looked at me, and he said, ‘You’ve got to do that for six months.’ “
The ‘Titanic’ star also changed her accent for HBO series ‘Mare of Easttown’ as she played a character from Pennsylvania’s Delaware County.
She admitted putting that much thought into the voice was quite intense, but she knew she needed to pull it off properly.
Back in 2021, she told the Los Angeles Times newspaper: “It’s interesting, because I realise that as I was learning the dialect it was definitely affecting the emotional register of the voice I was finding for Mare.
“Because she was born there, she was raised there, I had to do it pretty darn well. It was a little crazy-making, I’m not going to pretend it wasn’t.”
