Ricky Gervais has revealed that the only celebrity to ever push back on their Extras script was Kate Winslet.
The 64-year-old comedian would invite A-listers to play themselves on the sitcom about the lives of background actors, which he co-produced with Stephen Merchant and ran for two series from 2005.
In Winslet’s episode – the third in the first series – the Titanic actor was written by Gervais and Merchant to be working on the Holocaust film, Sisters of Mercy, in which she starred as a nun sheltering jews.
During one scene, one of the show’s lead characters, an extra called Maggie Jacobs, tells Winslet that she wants to have phone sex with her boyfriend. but says she doesn’t know what to say.
The scene shows Winslet offering Maggie explicit advice on what to do on the phone with her boyfriend, later making lewd gestures behind the partner’s back. However, some of the original lines were so “offensive” the Oscar-winning star refused to say them.
Speaking to The Telegraph, Gervais said that, when working on the show, he and Merchant would write a script with them in mind “to see if they were happy” once they signed on.
He reflected: “They almost all were. I think Kate Winslet had a couple of lines that were particularly offensive that she wouldn’t say, but other than that she was game for it.”
Elsewhere in the sketch, Winslet said she was only doing a Holocaust drama in order to win an Academy Award. Coincidentally, the star then went on to win an Oscar for a Holocaust film, The Reader, in 2008.
Gervais said it had been “surprisingly easy” to get celebrities to agree to film explicit material, saying there were just two famous faces who turned him and Merchant down when asked to appear on the show.
“One was Syd Little of ‘Little and Large’. He read the script and thought it was too much, the swearing or whatever. He was an old family entertainer,” the comedian said.
The other was Orville the Duck ventriloquist Keith Harris, who thought the entire programme was a prank.
“It wasn’t as common at the time to have these A-listers ridiculing themselves,” Gervais reflected. “It was before social media – before everyone found out that celebrities are just like us. They’re idiots!”
