Kate Winslet recalls ‘abusive’ fat shaming comments while filming Titanic, and helps answer this never-ending debate about the film’s ending

Could Jack have fit on the door with Rose?

This is the one question that has been asked countless times since Titanic first sailed into movie theaters in 1997.

Well, some 25 years later, Kate Winslet just might have solved it.  

In the very rare chance that you still haven’t seen Titanic, at the end of the film, Rose and Jack are stranded in the ocean, along with thousands of others cast off from the shipwrecked giant. Trying to stop from freezing in the arctic temperatures, Jack puts Rose safely on top of the remains of a door floating in the ocean.

When Jack tries to get on the door with Rose, they both topple back into the water. So, Jack being the noble gent he is, decides to let Rose stay on it alone.

Sadly for Jack, this means he eventually freezes to death in the deathly cold ocean, with Rose having to let him go as she’s eventually rescued. Cue heart-breaking Celine Dion song. Cue plenty of tears from everyone.

And this is where the fiery debate begins to rage. Could they have tried to share space on the door after their first failed attempt? Wasn’t there room for both of them?

“I don't f---ing know. That's the answer. I don't f---ing know.” That was Kate’s first stab at the answer, giving the Happy Sad Confused podcast an amusingly exasperated reply.

Clearly she’s been asked this a lot over the last 25 years.

However, she does circle back to give a definitive answer once and for all.

"Look, all I can tell you is, I do have a decent understanding of water and how it behaves," Winslet said, noting that she has experience paddleboarding, scuba diving, and kitesurfing. "If you put two adults on a stand-up paddleboard, it becomes immediately, extremely unstable. That is for sure."

"I have to be honest: I actually don't believe that we would have survived if we had both gotten on that door," she said. "I think he would have fit, but it would have tipped and it would not have been a sustainable idea."

"So, you heard it here for the first time," Kate concluded. "Yes, he could have fit on that door, but it would not have stayed afloat. It wouldn't."

While solving this decades long debate, Kate also touched on some cruel fat-shaming she received after filming the epic movie, aged just 21.

"They were so mean. I wasn't even… fat," she said. "If I could turn back the clock, I would have used my voice in a completely different way… I would have said to journalists… 'Don't you dare treat me like this. I'm a young woman, my body is changing, I'm figuring it out, I'm deeply insecure, I'm terrified. Don't make this any harder than it already is.'"

"That's bullying, you know, and actually borderline abusive, I would say."

Kate, who has recently starred alongside her real-life daughter in powerful drama I Am Ruth, isn’t the only person to revisit the endless Titanic debate.

Titanic director James Cameron revealed that he's conducted and filmed an entire scientific study to prove that there was no way Jack and Rose could've made it to safety together. 

"We took two stunt people who were the same body mass of Kate and Leo and we put sensors all over them and inside them and we put them in ice water," he told the Toronto Sun. "We tested to see whether they could have survived through a variety of methods and the answer was, there was no way they both could have survived."

"Only one could survive." 

So, there we have it. Jack was always destined for the bottom of the ocean.