Zoe Saldaña and Kate Winslet on EMILIA PEREZ, LEE and More for VARIETY Magazine

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In a new conversation for VARIETY’s Actors on Actors issue, “Avatar: The Way of Water” costars Zoe Saldaña and Kate Winslet discuss “Emilia Pérez,” “Lee,” Winslet acquiring the kitchen table of the real-life Lee, and more. 

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Saldaña on how she became involved with “Emilia Pérez”: “It was through my agents. But I have to say that it’s through the power of manifestation. I’ve always been a little bit cynical about the relationship that we have with the universe, and yet the universe has always been talking to me directly whenever I’ve sought direct advice and guidance. And these films, ‘Avatar,’ ‘Star Trek,’ ‘Guardians of the Galaxy,’ they gave me so much. But as they became super successful and became machines and worldwide phenomenons, all that was happening while I was also getting married and starting my family. So there was very little time for me to…start stretching my muscles again and challenge myself. You find yourself just full of frustration, and you don’t know where to put it. I had a conversation with my agents, and we wrote down a list of great directors—a very small list. They called me up and they said, ‘Jacques Audiard is casting for his next movie, and it’s going to be in Spanish, and it’s an opera and it takes place in Mexico, and we really do believe there’s a part that is just perfect for you.’ Your self-sabotage comes up. Immediately, it’s like, ‘Oh, wait, wait, wait. You’re not Mexican. Oh, wait, wait, wait. You can’t sing, you can’t dance, you can’t do this.’ And I was like, ‘Well, but I want to meet him. I just want to have a conversation with him.’ And we had a Zoom, and it was such a great connection that I had with Jacques.”

Saldaña on making “Emilia Pérez” a musical: “It was beautiful. It was brilliant. And those are words that I don’t like to use that much in what we do, but I do believe that Jacques’ decision to make this a musical, to make this operatic, was brilliant in the sense that these women needed to have these breaths of song and dance in order for you to really get to feel them and get to know them. I love the fact that he wasn’t afraid of how complex they were, and these are women with really damaged lives—very fragile, very desperate. And yet they were deserving of love. They were deserving of freedom of their journey. And I hadn’t seen that in a long time.”

Winslet on portraying World War II photographer Lee Miller in “Lee”:  “…the reason I wanted to tell Lee’s story was precisely because of what you just identified: You didn’t know who she was. So many people don’t know that those photographs they may have seen connected to the conflict of World War II and the Nazi regime, so many people have never connected the dots and realized that actually it was a middle-aged woman who took those images. She had been a model in her life for a brief period in her 20s. She had been defined that way—defined through the male gaze—often described alongside her love life. And it just drove me crazy, because her life was so much beyond that…We are trying to live our lives as women, redefining femininity to mean resilience and power and courage and compassion. And that to me is who Lee was.”

Winslet on acquiring Lee Miller’s kitchen table at an auction: “I’d been to an exhibition of hers in the early 2000s in Edinburgh, and then years later, some friends of mine called me who work in an auction house, and they said, ‘This table was the kitchen table in the home of [Lee’s] family.’ They know how much I love to cook and appreciate family mealtimes. And Lee was a great cook, and she would cook all these wonderful meals, and they would have these wonderful times around this table. I bought this table’…I sat down at the table, and I thought, ‘Why hasn’t anyone made a movie about Lee Miller?’”

[Photo Credit: Alexi Lubomirski for Variety – Video Credit: Variety/YouTube]

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