- Kate Winslet held her breath for over seven minutes while filming "Avatar: The Way of Water."
- After coming up for air, Winslet thought she had died.
It isn't often actors have a brush with death while filming, but Kate Winslet came pretty close while shooting "Avatar: The Way of Water."
In an interview with Total Film Magazine ahead of the film's December 16 release, Winslet revealed that she thought she was "dead" after holding her breath underwater for seven minutes and 15 seconds and coming up for air.
"I have the video of me surfacing saying, 'Am I dead, have I died?'" Winslet said. "Straight away I wanted to know my time. And I couldn't believe it."
Winslet clarified that holding her breath for that long was not an edict from director James Cameron, but the actress viewed the moment as an opportunity to break her own personal record. But in doing so, she also broke the record previously held by Tom Cruise, who held his breath for six minutes while filming an underwater stunt for "Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation" in 2015.
"It's just that the opportunity to set a record presented itself," she added. "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."
Winslet worked extensively underwater during production, which was part of Cameron's overall mission to have the water sequences for the film be as authentic as possible. The entire cast as a result learned scuba diving, and Cameron even created new technology to film motion capture scenes underwater.
Despite the demands of filming underwater, Winslet said the biggest challenge filming "Avatar: The Way of Water" was actually blending into Cameron's imaginative world.
"The biggest challenge was something people really wouldn't imagine – it was fitting into this world and yet appearing to have always been there," said Winslet, who credited Zoe Saldaña with helping decide the body movements of the Na'vi people. "And so learning that quickly from her, and from the movement coaches who were also part of the film, that was the hardest part, because there's nothing worse than a new actor coming in and you're bumped by it, because what they're doing is big or too much or trying to fit."