How to Fail with Kate Winslet

I rarely listen to podcasts these days. Do you?

I used to love them, but I find so many podcast hosts deeply irritating… Too enamoured of their own voices, too impressed by their own stories.

So when I find a really excellent podcast, well! What a treat. This one (@howtofailpod) is so good I’ve listened to it twice. The host is lovely (yay!) and the guest is superb… Kate Winslet. What a legend.

They discuss her failings, in this episode (as the title suggests) but also how to balance a career you really care about with motherhood. And how it should be the strength and ease of our bodies that define us, not the shape. And – critically! – how beautiful older women are, and how totally wild it is that so many actresses immobilize their faces just to look younger.

This drives me nuts, friends. Acting is a career that requires you to express emotion in your face, and our culture is so youth-obsessed that we expect our actresses not to age… and so they inject substances into their faces and have surgery so their faces can no longer move. Do you *hear* the insanity here?!

Nicole Kidman is the loudest example of this at the moment – she is such an excellent actress but has turned herself into a smooth shop mannequin. And I understand (somewhat?) that the pressure in LA must be so intense, and that if you’ve built a career on being cute and pretty then you better stay cute and pretty… But it is a relief to hear someone famous speak out about this.

Surely it’s a collective insanity we’re in, that future generations will look back on in disbelief? Or are we at the beginning of all trying to look like AI robots? Maybe we’re all in an episode of Black Mirror and we don’t know it yet!

Either way, this podcast is a total slice of joy. Highly recommended! Please let me know any other podcast gems that are better than listening to my favourite songs on repeat (it’s a pretty high standard, not going to lie!)

Any to recommend?