Kate Winslet has admitted that it wasn’t “easy” to get Helen Mirren to star as the dying matriarch in her directorial debut.
Written by Winslet’s 21-year-old son Joe Anders, Goodbye June is about four adult children who are forced to reunite in the wake of the failing health of their mother during Christmastime.
Joined by her two co-stars, Andrea Riseborough and Toni Collette, on Wednesday’s episode of The View, Winslet shared that she and her son had originally created a wishlist of actors they would like to play each character.
“They all said yes,” the Titanic star shared, noting that Mirren was the last person she spoke to about the movie. “It was not easy, and yet it was very straightforward,” she added of getting the British icon to sign on.
After describing the movie to Mirren, she recalled the 1923 star warning her that she has “two personal rules: I don’t want to play anyone with dementia, and I don’t want to play someone who’s dying.”
That was exactly the role Winslet had in mind for the Oscar-winning actor.
“So I said to her, ‘Look, I don’t need to send [the script] to you. Thank you for speaking,’” Winslet recalled. “She said, ‘No, send it. I think it sounds really lovely.’”
A week later, the Emmy-winning Mare of Easttown alum received an email from Mirren, saying, “I’ll break my rule. I’d love to support you.”
In Goodbye June, which will be released Friday on Netflix, Winslet plays one of June’s daughters, Julia, alongside Riseborough, Collette, and Johnny Flynn as her siblings. Harry Potter star Timothy Spall portrays their father, Bernie.
Shooting the movie, inspired in part by the death of her own mother, took a deep and personal toll on Winslet. Her mother, Sally Bridges-Winslet, died in 2017 from ovarian cancer.
“It wasn’t necessarily cathartic, but there were days when I was literally reliving what happened when I lost my own mum, even though our film is fictional. And I would find myself strangely trying to almost hide in a funny way,” Winslet said on a recent episode of the Happy Place podcast.
“So in the more intimate scenes, perhaps between Helen Mirren and Tim Spall, you know, I would just sit very quietly in the room that we were shooting in and I would hide behind Max, our lovely focus puller, and I would just sit with him quietly watching his monitor and sort of crying on his back.”
Of making her long-awaited directorial debut, Winslet said: “I felt proud of myself, as a woman, at this time of my life, I just turned 50, and to be doing something that I watched so many men do before and I’d seen male actors transition into directing and have done really successfully and largely without any judgment or scrutiny, and it’s just not the same for girls.
“It feels like for you personally, not only is this an amazing challenge for you to make that switch, but also you’re doing it on behalf of women to help this cultural shift in the very male-dominated Hollywood directing scene.”
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