Kate Winslet sat down with ET this week in New York City during promotion for her new film, The Reader.

Kate tells ET that shooting the film “took me to the brink in many ways.” For the nude scenes in the movie, Kate says she refused to work out because, “It was important to me to look real. I really don’t believe in this notion that actors and actresses should look untouchably perfect.”

In the film, Kate ages 35 years thanks to make-up and padding, “It was exhausting. It took seven hours to put on every day and the body suit weighs about 15 pounds.”

A haunting story about horrific war crimes, truth and reconciliation, The Reader stars Kate as Hanna, a woman in post-WWII Germany who plunges into a passionate and secretive affair with a younger man named Michael Berg (David Kross) and then suddenly disappears. Several years later, Michael, now a law student, sits in on the Nazi war crime trials, only to find Hanna forced to defend herself in the courtroom.

“It is a love story; it’s not a Holocaust movie,” says Kate. “It’s about these two people falling in love and needing each other in ways that really surprise them both.”

As for the fact that she’s 15 years older than her 18-year-old co-star, she says that their love scenes were nothing but professional. “It was the same as shooting any other scene of that nature,” she explains. “A scene with that level of intimacy involving nudity, you know, it’s always nerve-wracking, and you really have to rehearse those scenes so that everybody knows exactly what’s going on. He (David) didn’t need that much looking after.”

The Reader opens December 10th.

Here are some pictures of Kate in The Reader.  And if you’re interested, here’s the trailer!

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