Kate Winslet’s Post-Oscar Career Choices, Ranked in Order of Bizarreness

Director: Danny Boyle
Character: Joanna Hoffman, right-hand woman to the title megalomaniac
How Bizarre (scale of 1-10): 1

This may be a case of results-based risk analysis, but everything about Steve Jobs worked. It was a great script from Aaron Sorkin, and Joanna was a great role, second only to Jobs in importance to the script. It allowed Winslet to stretch while also relying on her abundant charm, and ultimately Joanna is the closest thing Steve Jobs has to a hero. Winslet was rewarded with her first Oscar nomination, for Best Supporting Actress, since her big win seven years prior.

Where to stream Steve Jobs

Director: Steven Soderbergh
Character: Dr. Erin Mears, CDC doctor sent to investigate the outbreak of a new pandemic.
How Bizarre (scale of 1-10): 2

Again, as with Steve Jobs, there’s no good reason to pass up this movie, one of Soderbergh’s most underrated. The all-star cast, including Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jude Law, and Marion Cotillard, put Winslet in fine company, without the film ever feeling weighted down by its star power. The only possible drawback would be the relative lack of screen time, but when you’re in a movie like this one where everything is working, I can’t imagine that being too huge a concern. More people should talk about this movie, something you could say about a lot of Winslet’s choices of this era, though Contagion is the only one where you could mean it as a compliment.

Where to stream Contagion

Director: Alan Rickman
Character: Sabine De Barra, tasked with building an outdoor ballroom in the Versailles gardens for King Louis XIV
How Bizarre (scale of 1-10): 4

This would rank higher if the film itself didn’t possess a humble charm that elevates everybody involved with it. On the surface, Winslet lending herself to an odd little period romance about a gardener is strange, and director Alan Rickman’s only other project as a director, 1997’s The Winter Guest, didn’t do much for Emma Thompson’s career either. But, of course, Rickman and Winslet (and Thompson, for that matter) are family, going back to Sense and Sensibility, and you can feel the affection between Winslet and Rickman in their scenes in A Little Chaos. It’s not the next great costume drama or anything, but it’s a beautiful little movie that could have had 30 minutes cut from it and become a great movie, so it’s still worth appreciating.

Where to stream A Little Chaos

Director: Neil Burger; Robert Schwentke
Character: Jeanine Matthews
How Bizarre (scale of 1-10): 5

The Divergent movies went from bad to worse to disastrous, and ultimately we may never see the series concluded on film. But it’s tough to lay the blame for that on Winslet’s doorstep. Sure, Winslet was too good to play the bureaucratic bad guy in a YA sci-fi adaptation, but so were Julianne Moore in The Hunger Games and Meryl Streep in The Giver. This is a rite of passage for Oscar-winning actresses, it seems, and Winslet was just following suit.

Where to stream Divergent

Director: Roman Polanski
Character: Nancy Cowan, Brooklyn parent whose son hit another boy with a stick
How Bizarre (scale of 1-10): 6

Yes, Roman Polanski is Roman Polanski, with all the controversy that implies. It’s not really enough to simply point to Chinatown and Rosemary’s Baby and like it’s a no-brainer, because it is. It is a brainer. There is certainly room to refuse a Polanski film. This particular film, an adaptation of Yasmina Reza’s decidedly stagebound play God of Carnage really ought to have occasioned some more thought go into the decision. It’s a tricky adaptation, and if you watch the movie, you’ll see it’s ultimately too tricky for Polanski and Reza (adapting her own work) to pull off. Still, that didn’t stop fellow Oscar winners Christoph Waltz and Jodie Foster (along with John C. Reilly) from signing on. God of Carnage was a savagely funny, loudly immediate play that held audiences in its grip and squeezed, while Polanski’s Carnage felt lightweight and frivolous.

Where to stream Carnage

Director: John Hillcoat
Character: Irina Vlaslov, Russian mob wife and principal antagonist
How Bizarre (scale of 1-10): 7

From the director of The Road comes a crime thriller starring an absurdly overqualified cast including Winslet, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Casey Affleck, Woody Harrelson, Aaron Paul, Anthony Mackie, and a pre-Wonder Woman Gal Gadot. You almost want to go see it, don’t you? Well, hardly anybody else did, and this hardly anybody saw Winslet’s insane big-hair-and-vodka take on a Russian mob boss.

Where to stream Triple 9

Director: Jocelyn Moorhouse
Character: Myrtle “Tilly” Dunnage, a dressmaker who returns to her small Australia town after being exiled for a murder
How Bizarre (scale of 1-10): 8

This movie is bughouse crazy but maybe doesn’t know it, and Kate Winslet took a look at this script (from Moorhouse and her husband, Muriel’s Wedding director P.J. Hogan) and said “I want in!” You could almost understand it as a camp entry into her filmography. It would certainly fit into the Post-Oscar Winslet trend of picking movies that are slightly beneath her just because they make for strange Oscar bait. It would be hard to imagine why Winslet would sign onto a movie with such limited appeal, though at least in the finished product, Winslet looks like a million bucks. It’s easily the most Movie Star performance she’s done in a decade, and the hair, makeup, and costume departments have nothing to be ashamed of.

Where to stream The Dressmaker

Director: Jason Reitman
Character: Adele Wheeler, depressed housewife and mom who ends up sweatily in love with an escaped criminal
How Bizarre (scale of 1-10): 8

The Joyce Maynard novel upon which this film is based is highly acclaimed, but the wheels were falling off of the Jason Reitman bandwagon by this point, so few were all that eager to make excuses for the tonal problems and overall muddiness of Labor Day the film. No easier a sell than Peter Travers at Rolling Stone called the movie a “treacly cocktail of romantic swill.” I mean!

Director: Peter Farrelly
Character: Beth, who ends up on a date with a man (Hugh Jackman) with testicles hanging from his neck
How Bizarre (scale of 1-10): 9

Honestly, I don’t know whose gambling debts Winslet was paying off for starring in this aggressively off-putting and vulgar series of comedy vignettes, but if there’s a more obvious example of Winslet slumming it after winning her Oscar than staring at Hugh Jackman’s neck-testicles for the (blessedly brief) running time of their little corner of the movie.

Where to stream Movie 43

Director: David Frankel
Character: Claire Wilson, who is determined to help her emotionally beleaguered friend Howard from going even farther off the rails
How Bizarre (scale of 1-10): 10

You should honestly see Collateral Beauty, if you haven’t already. Not because it’s good, but because it is bad in such forthright, exuberant ways. Winslet is a secondary character, but she gets her own suboplot about wanting to have a baby that — as is the case with everything else in the movie — is blazingly obvious and very, very stupid. Collateral Beauty is the all-star team of taking a movie that’s beneath your talents, starring Will Smith, Winslet, Helen Mirren, Edward Norton, Keira Knightley, Naomie Harris, and Michael Peña. That’s 19 combined Oscar nominations for this cast. NINETEEN! It’s unfathomable, as is this movie, frankly.