Kate Winslet has said she rejected a retouched promotional poster and insisted her “bulgy bit of belly” was not edited out of a sex scene for her TV series “Mare of Easttown.”

The British actress told the New York Times that the show’s director said he would remove a shot of her stomach during the scene in the HBO miniseries, to which Winslet replied: “Don’t you dare!”

Winslet also said she sent back a poster for the series twice after noticing that her skin had been airbrushed, arguing that audiences relate more strongly to characters who look real.

“They were like ‘Kate, really, you can’t,’ and I’m like ‘Guys, I know how many lines I have by the side of my eye, please put them all back,'” she said in the interview, published on Monday.

The series, in which Winslet plays a small-town detective investigating a murder, was warmly received and aired its final episode on Sunday. (HBO and CNN share a parent company, WarnerMedia.)

The Oscar-winning actress told the newspaper that viewers have been “starved” of shows that accurately portray female bodies. She suggested that people have connected to her character in part because she is “a fully functioning, flawed woman with a body and a face that moves in a way that is synonymous with her age and her life and where she comes from.”

Winslet, 45, has been nominated for seven Academy Awards, winning once in 2009 for her role in “The Reader.”
The “Titanic” star has frequently spoken out about the pressures on actresses to maintain a certain appearance throughout their careers, after her rise to stardom in the 1990s prompted repeated discussions about her weight in tabloid media.

In 2003, the British magazine GQ apologized for airbrushing photographs of Winslet after she said she had not approved the changes. And in 2008 she told Vanity Fair of her initial years in acting: “I was fat. I didn’t know any fat famous actresses. I just did not see myself in that world at all, and I’m being very sincere.”
In April, she said her daughter Mia Threapleton had begun an acting career “under the radar” by using her father’s name.