Kate Winslet had to fight every ounce of maternal instinct in her body on the set of her latest project, I Am Ruth. In the feature-length Channel 4 drama, Winslet and her real-life daughter, Mia Threapleton, star as a mother and her child caught in the cold, lonely grip of a mental health crisis. “There were moments when I would look at Mia and go, ‘Oh my god, she’s doing it. She’s really doing it.’ And I wanted to hug her and make it stop,” Winslet told press at the event’s launch last week, blinking back tears as she recalled her 22-year-old acting out a panic attack. “My instinct was to go, ‘I’ve got you,’ straight away, and I had to resist it at every turn.”
The drama, which will leave any parent, and anyone who remembers being a teenager, shaken, is the latest in writer-director Dominic Savage’s female-led anthology series I Am..., which has previously seen him collaborate with actors from Vicky McClure and Letitia Wright to Lesley Manville. Savage works with his leads to find a subject close to their hearts – with McClure it was coercive control; with Suranne Jones it was anxiety. This time, it’s teenage mental health and the tyranny of social media. The result of Savage and Winslet’s collaboration is a claustrophobic, gut-wrenching two-hour game of cat-and-mouse, as a deeply depressed Freya (Threapleton) sinks further and further below the surface and Winslet’s Ruth struggles to pull her out of the riptide.
