Kate Winslet fought to have ‘bulgy bit of belly’ during ‘Mare of Easttown’ sex scene

Kate Winslet wanted it all to hang out when it came to her latest role in “Mare of Easttown.”

The Academy Award winner revealed that she pushed back against several attempts to make her character look more attractive on the buzz-worthy HBO crime drama.

Winslet portrays a Pennsylvania detective named Marianne “Mare” Sheehan who’s investigating the murder of a young girl in the Brad Ingelsby-created series.

The “Titanic” star’s top priority was to have the character look like a real-world middle-aged woman, so when director Craig Zobel told her that her “bulgy bit of belly” could be removed from her sex scene Winslet told him, “Don’t you dare!”

“Listen, I hope that in playing Mare as a middle-aged woman — I will be 46 in October — I guess that’s why people have connected with this character in the way that they have done because there are clearly no filters,” she said during a recent interview with The New York Times. “She’s a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from. I think we’re starved of that a bit.”

In an effort to keep it really real, Winslet revealed that she also sent the show’s promotional poster back twice because it was too retouched: “They were like ‘Kate, really, you can’t,’ and I’m like ‘Guys, I know how many lines I have by the side of my eye, please put them all back…’

The actress, a spokeswoman for Lancôme cosmetics, revealed that she also balked after seeing an early cut in which her ordinarily luminous skin looked too good. ‘We tried to light it to make it look not nice,’ she shared.

More of Winslet’s method approach to her character entailed her shopping for the character’s clothing at a Wawa convenience store, and leaving all of Mare’s clothing crumpled up in a pile on the floor of her trailer so that all of her outfits could appear appropriately worn and wrinkled.

“Whenever we’d find something unflattering we’d be jumping up and down like, ‘Yes! We’re wearing this.’” she said.

Winslet previously described the character as “kind of disgusting” earlier in the show’s run.

“She’s a hot mess most of the time, she doesn’t give a sh*t what she looks like, she’s kind of stopped caring what people even think about her,” she told IndieWire. “We made decisions creatively that this was a woman who looked at herself in the mirror when she brushed her teeth in the morning and would not look in the mirror again [all day]. That’s just who she is. That’s like most busy mothers I know — that’s like me. It really is.”