Mia Threapleton on Booking Acting Roles Without Kate Winslet’s Help

Mia Threapleton might be the daughter of Oscar winner Kate Winslet, but she’s determined to make it as an actress in her own right.

“I remember her being quite caught off-guard, going, ‘Oh, really? OK,’” Threapleton, 24, recalled to The Sunday Times in a profile published on Sunday, May 18, of the first time she told her mom about her career ambitions.

While Threapleton was just 10 years old when she realized she had an interest in performing, it took her another five years before she started auditioning in earnest. By age 15, Threapleton signed herself up on online casting boards to “try and see what was out there.”

“I wanted to do that on my own,” Threapleton stated to the British newspaper, dodging a follow-up question about nepotism in the industry. “I don’t really know how to answer that, to be honest. I mean, you can’t [choose your parents]. You can’t.”

Mia is Winslet’s daughter with ex-husband Jim Threapleton. (Winslet, 49, also shares son Joe, 21, with ex-husband Sam Mendes and son Bear, 11, with husband Edward Abel Smith.)

As Mia has followed in her mom’s footsteps, she’d be remiss not to ask for pointers along the way.

“[She said], ‘Read the damn script as many times as you can,” Mia added. “She was very, very encouraging of me doing it on my own and for myself, having the experiences being mine and mine alone. But she always — I mean, always — emphasized the hard work that goes into it and the effort that needs to go into it.”

The Buccaneers star got her big break acting opposite Winslet in 2022’s I Am Ruth.

“It was quite frightening at times because both of us were going into extremely emotionally intense places,” Mia recalled of playing mother-daughter in the emotional drama. “I remember her saying to me when we started, ‘We can’t be sad all the time. We have to be able to come home and have a lovely cup of tea and a biscuit.’”

Mia further revealed that her home life with Winslet, when the cameras stopped rolling, was anything but glamorous.

“That’s a big misconception people have,” she said of her low-key upbringing devoid of star-studded gatherings. “I can count, probably on one and a half hands, the amount of times that I did that as a child, and I don’t really remember any of them.”

Mia continued, “It’s a work environment, so I understand why my mother didn’t do that. You have to concentrate. It’s a job — you want to do your best work.”