Kate Winslet Made Ricky Gervais Tone Down Her Hilariously Explicit ‘Extras’ Scene
TV comedy legend Ricky Gervais says that one of the best celebrity cameos from his beloved show business comedy Extras wasn’t as “offensive” and boundary-pushing as he wanted it to be. Sometimes, the woke mob calls from inside the house.
Long before Gervais began to brand himself as stand-up comedy's boldest provocateur — who else is brave enough to joke about transgender people going to the bathroom? — the 64-year-old comedian had a reputation for ribbing the rich and famous that extended to all facets of his work. In America, this meant that Gervais was the perennial and ever-acerbic roast master of the Golden Globes, but, even before his overseas success, the U.K.-born Gervais made an entire two-season cult-classic sitcom out of his love for making famous people uncomfortable using the power of comedy.
From 2005 to 2007, Gervais and his long-time TV partner Stephen Merchant blessed the BBC with their show Extras, a comedy centered around the working actors who hang out in the background while the big names go for their Oscars in Holocaust dramas. Titanic star Kate Winslet was one of the first A-listers to get the Extras treatment, and in a Telegraph interview celebrating the 20th anniversary of Extras, Gervais and Merchant revealed that Winslet was also the first star to push back on their scripts.
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As Merchant explained, the original premise of Extras was that he and Gervais would use A-list talent as actual extras in the series, rather than giving them guest star roles in which they would play rude and ridiculous versions of themselves. “You’d see Sam Jackson or Kate Winslet, but they’d say nothing. They were just extras in the show,” Merchant explained, though that pitch didn’t last long. “At some point, we thought if we got them all the way to the set, it seems silly to squander them. We started to think about how they could interact with the characters.”
“It was famous people behaving badly,” Gervais explained of how Extras decided to use the long line of world-famous celebrities who were begging for a chance to work with the guys who made The Office. “That’s what it could have been called.”
Centered around background actors Andy Millman (Gervais) and his friend Maggie Jacobs (Ashley Jensen), Extras instead told the story of two artists who didn’t make it big, but still got to brush shoulders with whichever bizarre, top-level talent graced the set that week.
Understanding the power of their reputation as TV comedy savants, Merchant and Gervais tried to see how far they could take the joke of Extras. “The more that these people said that they were interested, the more it became a game of what would be the most unpleasant or funniest version of themselves — the one that was most incongruous with their public image,” said Merchant.
However, as they admitted, sometimes, the bit went too far, and the A-lister had to push back. “I think Kate Winslet had a couple of lines that were particularly offensive that she wouldn’t say,” Merchant recalled. “But other than that she was game for it. They were just game for a laugh. There was very little push-back. It was surprisingly easy.”
Considering what did make it into the final cut of Winslet’s episode, in which she gave some graphic, creative and entirely un-erotic advice for how Maggie should attempt some phone sex with her boyfriend while dressed like a nun during World War II, Extras must have tried to make Winslet make some outrageously objectionable jokes — what if there were two trans people in the bathroom???
