Kate Winslet has revealed why she felt it was “really important” for I Am Ruth to be set in “a middle-class world”.
Winslet stars as concerned mother Ruth, in Channel 4’s newest instalment of director Dominic Savage’s I Am anthology series, whose daughter Freya slowly retreats into herself as the pressures of social media begin to weigh on her.
Freya’s played by Winslet’s real-life daughter Mia Threapleton, 22, whom she shares with ex-husband Jim Threapleton.
In a new interview with Sky News, published on 8 December, Winslet spoke about the feature-length drama and her reasoning for it being set in a middle-class world.
“Setting this in a middle-class world was really important to me,” she explained.
“I said to Dominic [Savage], we can only do this if we don’t set it in a lower socioeconomic environment because I feel that often when stories like that are told on television or on film, that typically they are set in a more lower-class environment and I don’t think that’s right, and I don’t think that’s accurate in terms of now.
“I think it is the middle classes who are struggling and coming across these issues and I think it’s taking their breath away and none of us as parents have a manual,” she added.
“Sometimes we do look our children in the eye and just think, ‘oh, my God, I don’t know what to do’.”
Earlier this week, at a Q&A for the drama’s launch, Winslet opened up about the emotional challenges she faced while filming the gut-wrenching two-hour episode.
She explained she had to “resist” every maternal “instinct” not to comfort her daughter while she acted out a panic attack on set.
“I wanted to hug her and make it stop,” the Titanic star admitted.
Threapleton is the oldest of Winslet’s three children, followed by Joe Mendes, 18, from Winslet’s second marriage to ex-husband Sam Mendes. She shares her youngest daughter, Bear Winslet, 9, with husband Edward Abel Smith, to whom she’s been married since 2012.
