Kate Winslet “desperately tried” to recast herself in Goodbye June.
Kate Winslet directed, produced, and stars in Goodbye June
The Mare of Easttown actress had only planned to produce and star in the seasonal family drama, which was written by her son Joe Anders, but when she also came on board as director, the 50-year-old star wanted to ease her workload because she felt she “cannot do three jobs” on one project.
She told Digital Spy: “I know I’m good at multitasking, but this is too many things.
“I desperately tried to recast myself [and] had a really good list of a handful of people who would have been absolutely brilliant in that role.”
However, Kate admitted she couldn’t resist the idea of working with Toni Collette, Andrea Riseborough and Johnny Flynn as her siblings and Dame Helen Mirren and Timothy Spall as her parents.
She added: “But at that point… well, first of all, Netflix were like, ‘Uh-uh’ and secondly, I’d cast all these incredible actors. How could I not go and play with them? Because that’s what we do. We play, we pretend and it’s an amazing thing.”
Kate previously admitted she had never wanted to direct until she read Joe’s script.
She told Sky News: “I’m incredibly impressed by him and really proud of him, not least because he wrote this screenplay and started writing it when he was 19.
“But he had to adapt and learn very, very quickly that when you’re developing something, you take notes, you take feedback.
“Netflix became involved at some stage that they were also giving notes to, and then I was sort of playing the role of kind of protecting the project and also protecting him at the same time from things that, you know, may necessarily not have been useful, things that actually were great ideas.”
And the Titanic star found that her acting experience really helped her in her role behind the camera.
She said: “We know what works for us as actors from a director.
“We know what does not work, and we also know what’s actively destructive and sometimes that can mean the environment, the working environment.
“Film sets are very busy places it can often be frantic, sometimes it’s hard to kind of follow what’s going on or what you’re doing next, and it mattered to me enormously that everybody always felt extremely safe, completely informed, and very free.”