Since she first broke out onscreen more than three decades ago, Kate Winslet has defied expectations. From her heartbreaking performances in the period epic Titanic and the mind-bending romantic drama Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to her unshakable turns in The Reader and Mare of Easttown, the Academy Award and Emmy-winning actor has never shied away from a challenge. Goodbye June, her latest project and her directorial debut, is no exception.

Winslet directs, produces, and stars in the family drama, sharing the screen with fellow acting titans like Helen Mirren, Timothy Spall, and Toni Collette. “The two jobs weren’t enough, so I had to do three. What on earth is wrong with me?” Winslet jokes on the latest episode of the Skip Intro with Krista Smith podcast. “But I loved every second of it. I didn’t want it to finish. I could have gone on forever. I think that’s really because I loved the script.”

Written by Winslet’s son, Joe Anders, Goodbye June is about the love that can be found even amid the most challenging and tragic circumstances. After June (Mirren), a devoted mother and wife to her husband, Bernie (Spall), faces health complications from her cancer and must be placed in a hospital, her four adult children (Winslet, Collette, Andrea Riseborough, and Johnny Flynn) must navigate the chaos of their complicated familial dynamics and the unfathomable realities of potential loss and grief.

Winslet had only signed on to produce and star, but her devotion to the project pushed her into a place she had yet to inhabit: the director’s chair. “I remember Danny Boyle coming up to me on the set of Steve Jobs,” she says, “and he said to me, ‘You think like a director. When are you going to direct?’ And I was like, ‘Oh my God, please don’t make me.’ ”  She was familiar with the lengthy and extensive commitment required to be a director, one that, as a working mother, she might not have had time for. “Juggling an acting career and raising a family was always challenging, and I could pull that off, but there’s just no way that I would’ve been able to sidestep my mothering duties any earlier than now, and it happened in my 50th year. I do feel really fucking great about that.”

Here, the filmmaker and star reflects on what made her fall for the script, the challenge of directing herself, exploring grief onscreen, and more. 

An edited version of the conversation follows.

Krista Smith: What was that first read like for you when you started?

Kate Winslet: I am no stranger to reading things that my son has written, because he’s always written. I’m very familiar with his capacity as a writer, but it’s a completely different thing to know how to formulate a screenplay with a real structure and real characters that have to jump off that page and live and breathe and become something that is a narrative that pulls people in. And he had done it. What he had done that struck me most of all was that he had somehow been unafraid to explore the different, very complicated themes of family.

He really remembered very clearly losing his grandmother, my mother, in 2017, and was so struck by how everyone came together. People hadn’t seen each other for a really long time. People working away, living in different countries, and it was kind of miraculous. We gave her a passing that was wonderful. He took that as a backdrop and inspiration and created this completely fictional story from there because he realized that for so many people, actually being present when someone passes away is almost unheard of.

I have read that there are a few characters Helen Mirren has said she was never going to play, and one of them was a dying person. What was it that got you to get her to play June?

Winslet: I had worked with Helen before a very long time ago, so we sort of know each other a little bit. I spoke to her, and I told her what the story was, and I explained that I was going to send her this script, and that I was going to be directing it, and that I had never done that before. And she was very excited about that. Then she said, “Darling, I am going to have to stop you because I just need to tell you that I have always said I would never play anyone with dementia, and I would never play anybody who has cancer. So you just need to know that.”

And I said, “OK, well, read it anyway. See what you think.” And she was just very, very touched by the story, and she did love the role. She sort of didn’t want to do it. There was a part of her that was resisting like mad. And in her own words, she said, “I don’t really want to do it because I know it’s going to be terribly hard, and I do have those two rules that I told you about, but I’m actually going to break those rules, and I’m going to do this for you because I think that you will do a good job, and I feel like I will be in safe hands.” And I was so blown away.

Kate Winslet Talks Goodbye June, Directing, and More on Skip Intro

You really created such intimacy with every one of the characters. Even though there are sometimes 12 of them in one room, you’re getting all the big overarching action and dynamics, but then you’re also just dropping in these incredibly intimate moments that are so moving and, then the next minute, hilarious.

Winslet: I’m so thrilled that you felt that, because I never wanted to sit on the emotion for too long. If you stay on it for too long, it becomes indulgent, becomes saccharine, and suddenly you don’t feel for these people anymore.

How was it directing yourself?

Winslet: It was hard directing myself. I had to just rely on instincts, which is something I’ve learned to do in my life. The most wonderful thing about working with actors of this caliber is that no matter what I might have planned, it would always come out differently based on what I was being given. And that’s what great actors do. You give each other things that completely change the way you may have anticipated you were going to play a scene. It can just flip on a dime. 

It’s just finding the right tempo of when to offer something up and when to leave an actor be, and it came to me relatively instinctively. But there were definitely times when I would think to myself, “I think it’s better to just let them be for this moment rather than add something that might throw them or change a plan that they had that I don’t know about yet.” This is a family of messy, chaotic siblings who have lost their way with each other, and being free and open to that and letting them all be as messy as they wanted was absolutely delicious.

Helen Mirren and Kate Winslet.

This film is so universal because we all experience something like it. No one gets out of experiencing something like this.

Winslet: It’s something that happens to all of us. And you know what? We don’t talk about it in Western culture. We are really not very good at talking about loss. We have absolutely no infrastructure emotionally or a roadmap of any kind. It’s just interesting to think about the amount of stuff we don’t discuss and also the emotions we face, knowing that someone’s going to go — making sure that you’ve said everything, and also, when facing losing a parent, making sure you’ve asked them about their life. 

There’s one question that’s been amazing for me, because I’ve learned so much about myself and about my guests through this: How has your birth order shaped who you are in life?

Winslet: I’m the second eldest, and I think with a first child — and I know this myself, having been a parent — there’s a certain degree of hovering and making sure that they’re ready to go off into the world. I may have [missed] a little bit of that kind of protectiveness from my parents. I certainly felt very trusted and free, and I think the way that that has shaped my life path is that I’ve never questioned my own choices, because I was always empowered to make them from quite an early age and supported to do so. I’ve never thought about it in that context, but I think that’s possibly how it’s shaped my life path.