Kate Winslet reunites with James Cameron on the upcoming sequel, Avatar: The Way Of Water. The actor and filmmaker had earlier worked on the Oscar-winning film Titanic (1997) that shot Kate to global stardom along with her co-star, actor Leonardo DiCaprio. She recently revealed that she held her breath underwater for seven minutes and 15 second during a training session for the film. (Also read: Kate Winslet recalls how her agent got demeaning calls when she was a young actor: ‘How’s her weight?’)
Kate joins as a new character named Ronal alongside actors Sam Worthington, Zoe Saldaña, Stephen Lang and Sigourney Weaver for the sequel. Since much of the film takes place in the sea, the majority of the cast had to learn and practise free diving before they filmed their scenes. This was also the first time that the Oscar-winning actor had worked with motion capture for her performance in the film.
As a guest on The Graham Norton Show on Friday, Kate shared a video of her training with an instructor and holding her breath underwater for seven minutes and 15 seconds. After doing some breathing exercises, Kate asks, “Am I dead?” When she learns how long she held her breath, the actor gets all excited. Fellow guests on the talk show, Sir Lenny Henry, Nadiya Hussain, and Jack Whitehall also cheer her on.
Host Graham asked her how she did it. She replied, “Firstly, it is a sport. It’s not something you can try in the bath, it’s not something you can never ever do it by yourself. Actually what happens when people don’t know what they are doing, they come up and gasp, and that’s when people black out and run into trouble.” Kate pointed out the breathing sequences she did to regulate her breathing once back.
“The training I had was three weeks of training, every single day and you learn how to literally distribute the oxygen in your body. It’s a very detailed, extraordinary process. I loved it and got really good at it,” she said. Graham also joked, “You know who’s running a bath right now? Tom Cruise!” Tom held the previous record, for six minutes, while filming an underwater stunt for Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation in 2015. “You don’t think you can be brave enough to learn something new when you’ve left education behind. As a woman, I felt so great about it,” she added.