Keep the scissors away from Kate Winslet.
When the actress appeared on NBC's The Tonight Show Tuesday to promote her new movie, The Mountain Between Us, Jimmy Fallon wanted to discuss her previous ambition of becoming a hairdresser. "You really liked cutting hair," Fallon told Winslet. "That was going to be a thing?"
"When I was younger, I thought to myself, 'Well, if I don't end up making it as an actress—or if I don't get a job ever—I'd quite like to be a hairdresser.' I started by cutting my own hair, obviously, as one does," Winslet said. One time, before a wedding, Winslet's mother had booked them appointments in a salon—"which was a big deal in my house. Like, we did not go to hair salons ever! But I thought I would help her out. I think in my brain I thought I was saving her the money or something. So, I went underneath the kitchen table and gave myself haircut."
It wasn't long before Winslet decided to experiment on other people. "A family friend—who was a fully-grown man, ladies and gentleman!—allowed me to cut his hair, and I cut off a piece of his ear," the Oscar winner confessed. "I've never told this story on television ever in my life!"
Needless to say, it was pretty gruesome. "I actually saw it fall," Winslet recalled, adding that it was "a little nick" and not a "chunk" of his ear. "It was very upsetting! I was very traumatized."
Today, however, they both laugh about it. "I'm like, 'Where's the missing bit, Mick?' And he's like, 'It's my claim to fame!'" she laughed. "He's proud of his little bit of missing ear. Bless him!" Though most people don't even notice it, "I can tell and he can tell; it's our own special secret."
After the accident, Winslet decided to focus on her one true love: acting.
For her latest movie, The Mountain Between Us, Winslet and her co-star Idris Elba spent months on location in Vancouver. "I was very happy about the cold. I actually like cold weather and I love the snow. Idris...not so much," the actress revealed to Fallon. "He would have rather had the beach and didn't like the cold much at all. But there was no CGI. This film is very much what you see is what we did. It was amazing! We flew up to 10,000-feet altitude every day."
On the coldest day, she said, temperatures dipped to -38 degrees. "It was freezing. It's hard to move your face," she said. "You don't want to ever take your gloves off...It was pretty extreme."
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