Kate Winslet’s Sex Scenes in ‘The Regime’ Were Too Comical for the Crew to Handle

A lot of us could likely relate to Kate Winslet’s admission from behind the scenes on The Regime that, the minute her clothes came off, everyone around her started laughing.

In the HBO-made miniseries created by Succession writer Will Tracy, Winslet plays a paranoid autocrat in a fictional Central European country who starts an affair with a mercurial former soldier, played by Matthias Schoenaerts, that proves tumultuous for her reign. Winslet, of course, has a rich history of on-screen romantic entanglements that enchant audiences across the globe, and as such, has taken part in many of the most iconic and recognizable sex scenes in the history of imitated intimacy — she also models for aspiring artists, we hear.

However, Winslet isn’t some silly French girl in The Regime, and her character’s love life isn’t exactly as steamy as a sweaty palm pressed against a car window mid-coitus. In this series, Winslet is a hypochondriac despot who is having an affair with her “personal water diviner,” and their relations are as ridiculous as that sentence — or so the crew of The Regime seems to think. Speaking to Mail Online over the weekend, Winslet said that the production could barely get through filming one of her sex scenes without a breakdown, claiming, “Two people had to be sent out for laughing.” 

Looking at some of the less-favorable reviews of the dark comedy, at least someone’s laughing at The Regime.

“When we were shooting Episode Five, Elena and Zubak are having sex. And she's screaming at him: ‘No biting, no biting!’” Winslet said of the scene that caused the comical commotion on set. Chancellor Elena’s other “no-no’s” in The Regime include mold spores and bad breath, among many others. Winslet said of the production staff who had to be sent away during this scene, “One of them was Alwin Kuchler, our cinematographer, and one of the hair and makeup people.”

The latter’s removal posed a practical issue for The Regime. Or as Winslet explained, “That was actually kind of a problem because Matthias (Schoenaerts) had all these tattoos, and as he got sweatier and sweatier they just kept sort of rubbing off on me. And I said, ‘This is really like I’ve got the newspaper printed on me.’”

Hopefully that newspaper isn’t The Chicago Tribune. After all, reviewer Nina Metz wrote of The Regime’s un-sexy (and often un-funny) political overtones, “It strikes one cynical pose after another, numbing audiences with its expensive, sleek, irony-soaked style of pessimism. A small number of people were paid enormous sums of money to sell audiences on defeatism.”