Talking Russian mobsters with Kate Winslet
She might have taken on everything from flighty Austen heroines to Nazi war criminals, but ruthless Russian mob wife still isn’t a role that we would predict for Kate Winslet — so if you’re not aware of what you’re about to see, Triple 9 might come as a bit of a shock.
She isn’t predictable, exactly — we’d prefer “reliable” — but we can usually take a stab at her next role, and it doesn’t often involve an Eastern European accent or a foot-high mountain of hairspray.
Winslet’s characters are almost always strong, though — IMDB describes her back catalogue as being crammed with “devilish damsels” — so maybe it makes sense that she’s stepping this roguish quality up more than a couple of notches in this John Hillcoat-directed heist thriller.
In Triple 9 Winslet is the central female antagonist in an extremely masculine world of corrupt coppers and Russian gangs on the tough side of Atlanta. The stellar ensemble cast also features Breaking Bad’s Aaron Paul, future Wonder Woman Gal Gadot, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, and Chiwetel Ejiofor.
It’s undoubtedly a departure. So, was she taken aback to be offered the script? The answer, unequivocally, is yes: “It’s nothing,” she says, “like anything I’ve ever done before. At all.”
She is quick to admit that she’s a long-time fan of the storytelling John Hillcoat (the director most famous for The Road, The Proposition and Lawless) and it was the prospect of working with him — as well as wanting to be thrown back in at the deep end after having her third child — that made her take on the role of Irina. It was exciting, she says, “to be involved, and to do something so very different.”
The need to be kicked back to reality came after the birth of her son Buddy, which led her “just for a selfish acting standpoint to want a short, sharp jolt back into reality. I wanted to be terrified; I wanted to feel out of my comfort zone, and to work with a great group of people and to give (myself) that feeling back.”
Triple 9 “certainly did all of the above.”
In the film, Kate’s character Irina Vlasov is a mob wife, commanding her husband’s empire whilst he sits out a prison term — and she isn’t averse to using children as bait to get what she wants.
Being such a different character from the ones that she usually takes on and having just had a baby herself, this part of the character “absolutely” was difficult to get to grips with. Irina is characterised by money and lack of taste — big hair, big nails, spiked boots — and is wholly distinctive as the cruel and manipulative wife of an incarcerated villain.
It was one of the first times, Winslet says, “as an actor, where I couldn’t identify with this character at all. I couldn’t empathise, I couldn’t make peace with anything she did or said; I certainly couldn’t make peace with anything she wore. Her hair was… questionable.
“But it was fun to do something so different. It was fun to wear those horrible costumes, and have this great big hair-do. She had to look as though she believed she was put together, and well-dressed, when actually she looked a bit like a trashy slut.
“But that was part of the plan: the nails a bit too long and not a very nice colour, the hair just a bit too high, two inches of re-growth… red boots with red tights with a red coat. These are just not choices I would make. But it was really fun.”
The costume — especially a costume as prominent as this one — “changes everything, really. Until the costume goes on — or in some cases comes off… it changes absolutely everything. I don’t think you can fully play that part until the look is put together.”
The film might have been full of violence, much of it at the hands of Kate’s character, but it’s fair to say that she didn’t get off set entirely unscathed herself.
One pivotal moment sees Winslet and Chiwetel Ejiofor in a restaurant, in a scene that didn’t finish filming until 2am. Wrapping for the night, one — probably now forever shamefaced — extra managed to drop his chair on Kate’s foot. Her big toe is, she says matter-of-factly, “Still broken. It still bends out.”
Some might say that this minor bit of violence being inflicted on such a dislikeable character towards the end of filming might have been karma getting its own back. Even so, would she play a villain again?
It doesn’t appear to be something that she has fully considered — going as she did straight into Insurgent after filming Triple 9 (the spread-out nature of filming meant a visit to the Triple 9 set whilst filming the former, again in Atlanta, finally convinced fellow cast member Anthony Mackie that she was in the film and that Hillcoat wasn’t lying to him), probably means that she hasn’t had time to consider long-term career moves over the last couple of years. There have been two other films since then — Steve Jobs, for which she picked up a BAFTA just a day after our chat, and the less critically acclaimed The Dressmaker — so a return to drama and human emotion, so devoid in Irina, is clearly still her main calling.
She’s enthusiastic about the idea of exercising her villainous side again, though. “I loved, I really, absolutely loved it,” she says. “So probably, yes. It didn’t feel comfortable, in any way shape or form. I really did have to view it all as a story — it’s a character, it’s made up, it’s not real. It’s not real! But yes, I’d love to. It’s very much a different genre for me. It was so much fun to be part of something so different. So yes, probably. Hopefully.”
Triple 9 is out in UK cinemas now.
Originally published at https://www.thenationalstudent.com.
