Near, far, wherever you are: Kate Winslet is done with letting the “could Jack have actually fit on the door?” question go on.
More than 25 years after the release of Titanic, the actress, who stars in James Cameron‘s new film Avatar: The Way of Water, delivered the final verdict on whether or not her character Rose’s love interest, Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio), could’ve survived the icy cold waters of the Atlantic had Rose simply shared that floating plank of wood with him.
“I don’t f—ing know. That’s the answer. I don’t f—ing know,” she revealed, exasperated, on a recent episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast.
But then she reconsidered her response to the question. “Look, all I can tell you is, I do have a decent understanding of water and how it behaves,” Winslet said, noting that she has experience paddleboarding, scuba diving, and kitesurfing. “If you put two adults on a stand-up paddleboard, it becomes immediately, extremely unstable. That is for sure.”
With that analysis in mind, Winslet — who herself has expressed that she thought Jack could’ve fit alongside her character on the door — thinks it would’ve all come down to keeping the raft above water.
“I have to be honest: I actually don’t believe that we would have survived if we had both gotten on that door,” she said. “I think he would have fit, but it would have tipped and it would not have been a sustainable idea.”
“So, you heard it here for the first time,” Winslet concluded. “Yes, he could have fit on that door, but it would not have stayed afloat. It wouldn’t.”
The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind star isn’t the only one making waves this week with thoughts on Jack’s dreary demise. Titanic director James Cameron revealed that he actually conducted and filmed an entire scientific study to prove that there was simply no way Jack and Rose could’ve made it to safety together in the 1997 film.
“We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water,” he told the Toronto Sun. “We tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived. Only one could survive.”
While on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, Winslet also took a moment to set the record straight regarding critics’ claims that she was “too fat” to share the door with DiCaprio.
20th Century Fox/Paramount/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock Leonardo DiCaprio as Jack and Kate Winslet as Rose on the infamous ‘Titanic’ door
“They were so mean. I wasn’t even f—ing fat,” she said. “If I could turn back the clock, I would have used my voice in a completely different way… I would have said to journalists… ‘Don’t you dare treat me like this. I’m a young woman, my body is changing, I’m figuring it out, I’m deeply insecure, I’m terrified. Don’t make this any harder than it already is.’ That’s bullying, you know, and actually borderline abusive, I would say.”
Winslet, who was 22 when she shot Titanic, has been open about feeling bullied about her weight in the Oscar-winning film throughout the past 25 years. She explained on a 2021 episode of the WTF With Marc Maron podcast that she went into “self-protective mode” following the movie’s release after receiving “personal physical scrutiny” from the U.K. press.
Winslet acknowledged on Happy Sad Confused that the commentary surrounding women’s bodies has been “getting better” but that there’s still “such a ways to go.”
“It’s such an irresponsible thing to do , and it feeds directly into young women aspiring to ideas of perfection that don’t exist,” Winslet said on the podcast, noting that when she’s not on the red carpet, she’s in her “pajamas” and “eating chips and farting” just like anyone else.
“I just wish there weren’t quite so many comments on the physical form of actresses,” she said. “Why? You know, bodies are bodies. Everyone’s beautiful however they are and whatever they came with, you know? It still drives me kind of crazy. I definitely think we can do better with that stuff.”
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