Kate Winslet Had Unexpected ‘Titanic’ Reunion While Making ‘Lee’

More than 25 years after Kate Winslet‘s breakout role in Titanic, the band plays on.

While making her new biopic Lee, the Oscar winner watched composer Alexandre Desplat lead a 120-piece orchestra for the film’s score, where Winslet reconnected with someone she worked with on the 1997 James Cameron film.

“And I’m looking at this violinist and I thought, ‘I know that face,'” she recently recalled on The Graham Norton Show.

“You know when the Titanic is going down, and the violinist stands up and he goes, ‘Come on, lads,’ and he starts playing?” the actress explained. “It was that guy! I’m like, ‘It’s you!’ It was amazing.”

Winslet added, “It was him. It was just wonderful, and there he was. We had so many moments like that in the film, where people I’ve either worked before or really known for a long time [and] kind of grown up in the industry with, they just showed up for me, and it was incredible.”

Jonathan Evans-Jones played the violinist in Titanic, along with his fellow I Salonisti members, a chamber music ensemble founded in 1981.

Starring alongside Leonardo DiCaprio, Titanic earned Winslet an Oscar nomination for Best Actress, in addition to winning Best Picture and Best Director for Cameron. The historical fiction featured Winslet as rich debutante Rose Bukater and DiCaprio as poor artist Jack Dawson, who fall in love on the ill-fated ship’s maiden voyage in 1912.

Winslet most recently portrayed fashion model, turned World War II photographer, Elizabeth ‘Lee’ Miller, in the Ellen Kuras-directed Lee, which premiered in September.