Kate Winslet: "I thought I'd died"

We knew Kate Winslet had learned free diving for her role on Avatar 2, the James Cameron film. We even knew she could spend an impressive seven minutes and 14 seconds underwater without breathing. What we did not know, and it comes as a shocking revelation, is that Kate thought she'd died when she resurfaced after spending seven minutes submerged in the water tank.

On a recent interview, the actress commented: 'You can't think about anything, you can't make lists in your head, you're just looking at the bubbles underneath you…  My first words [when I resurfaced] were, ''Am I dead?'' Yes, I thought I'd died.'

Kate started training with her husband Ned Rocknrol, who struggled to keep up with her. She said: 'You have to have someone there. Ned trained with me and he got quite good at the breath holding as well. But he did… black out.'

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Producer Jon Landau previously revealed he was impressed with how quick Kate picked up the new skill.

Speaking at the IMAX Q&A for ‘Alita: Battle Angel, he said: "We built a water tank that was 500,000 gallons of water, and we are doing performance-capture under the water, on the surface of the water, and above the water. We trained our cast to free-breath-hold, because in the sequences they have to just be swimming, they can’t be on scuba, and they have to be able to do long takes.

"So we had a gentleman named Kirk Krack come in and train everybody that needed to be underwater how to go underwater and how to hold their breath. Kate Winslet had to train in this and she got up to a static breath hold of just about seven minutes. It’s amazing, it’s mind over matter. You see Kate going underwater and she just felt so comfortable. There was one day, we have a tank where she was just rehearsing and testing and we have some windows into it, and I go in there and she’s just walking on the bottom [of the tank] left and right, left and right, left and right, then she sees me in the window and she just waves. I couldn’t believe it!"