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After spending the last 13 years telling anyone who would listen that the original Avatar just isn’t that great of a movie (a take I neither invented nor solely perpetuated), you are now speaking to a man who has seen its long-awaited (?) sequel, The Way of Water.
And it was… good! The visual effects were sick and the story was not. So, basically just like the first one. We aren’t here for my review though, so onto the great Kate Winslet, one of the best actresses both of her generation and of all time.
Winslet reunited with Titanic director James Cameron to star as Ronal in Avatar: The Way of the Water, one of the franchise’s key new characters. Given that Ronal is one of the water-based Na’vi, the Oscar-winning actress had to spend an ungodly amount of time in the water during production, including intensely long underwater sequences.
One of those scenes, in fact, required Winslet to hold her breath for so long (7 minutes and 15 seconds, breaking Tom Cruise’s record) that when she finally resurfaced for air, she literally exclaimed “Am I dead?!”
“I have the video of me surfacing saying, ‘Am I dead, have I died?’ And then going, ‘What was [my time]?’” Winslet said in an interview with TotalFilm about filming an underwater scene for The Way of Water.
“Straight away I wanted to know my time. And I couldn’t believe it…The next thing I say is, ‘We need to radio set. I wanted Jim [Cameron]] to know right away… I didn’t have to hold my breath for over seven minutes. It’s just that the opportunity to set a record presented itself. I wanted to break my own record, which was already six minutes and 14 seconds. And I was like, ‘Come on!’ So I smashed my own record by a minute.”
In addition to Winslet, Avatar: The Way of Water stars Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang, Giovanni Ribisi, Sigourney Weaver, Edie Falco, Jemaine Clement, Michelle Yeoh, Brendan Cowell, Cliff Curtis, Oona Chaplin, CJ Jones, and more. The film will hit movie theaters in the United States on Friday, December 16.
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