You also may or may not know that one of Kate’s breakthrough roles was in Peter Jackson’s 1994 cult classic Heavenly Creatures, in which she played a young woman in an intense and obsessive friendship with a fellow teenager played by Yellowjackets star Melanie Lynskey.
During a recent appearance on the Team Deakins podcast, Kate was asked about what she brought to the role in terms of personal experience — and she revealed a personal fact about herself that she’d previously not discussed before in public.
“I’ll share something I’ve never shared before. Some of my first intimate experiences as a young teen were actually with girls,” she said. “I’d kissed a few girls, and I’d kissed a few boys, but I wasn’t particularly evolved in either direction.”
“At that stage in my life, I certainly was curious, and I think there was something about the really intense connection that those two women had that I profoundly understood,” she added, later stating that even though she had trouble fully understanding the darker aspects of Heavenly Creatures, she understood the “vulnerable” side of her character and the experiences she had in the film.
“I was so immediately sucked into the vortex of that world they were in that obviously became horrendously damaging to both of them, and they had huge insecurities and vulnerabilities.”
You can listen to the entire interview here.