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Cate Blanchett’s Golden Age
If it's not impossible, she's not interested...Playing complicated women is what this versatile, Oscar-winning actress does best.
There isn’t a better time to be in New York City than a few days before Christmas, but it’s safe to say that Cate Blanchett didn’t have a chance to skate at Rockefeller Center, light candles at St. Patrick’s Cathedral or shop the famous uptown department stores, despite being based at the Regency on Park Avenue, where she’d been holding court for reporters all day by the time I arrived.
Mine would be Ms. Blanchett’s second-to-last interview of a very long day in a string of very long days for the Oscar-winning actress. A journalist likes to have a leisurely, thoughtful conversation with a subject who’s mentally fresh, but that’s pretty much best case scenario. Hollywood publicists have a habit of wedging too many interviews into too few square hours of patience, and our sit-down was scheduled for a time when even the most accommodating interviewee could be forgiven if the edges of her charm should begin to fray. The night I arrived at the Regency marked the end of Blanchett’s whirlwind U.S. press tour, which just that day featured roundtable interviews until mid-afternoon and then one-on-ones well into the evening. Despite Blanchett’s gracious reputation, I didn’t know what to expect…
It’s been an incredible couple of years for this hardworking, married mother of two. Many actors exhale a bit when they win the Academy Award and have little dips in their career trajectories immediately afterward. Not Blanchett. Since she was presented with the gold statuette for her channeling of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator in 2005, the willowy Australian blonde has been in constant demand. Even though you don’t have to tell her about the risk of overexposure, it seems that, at least for now, she’s trying to oblige every interesting moviemaker who wants to work with her badly enough. With Alejandro González Iñárritu’s critically-acclaimed Babel still in theaters (which she stars in opposite Brad Pitt) and Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German just opening (which she stars in opposite George Clooney), Blanchett was in New York to promote Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal, the second of her four high-profile movies to play the big screen in 2007.
First up is Soderbergh’s noirish homage to 1940s movies in which she plays a complicated, war-damaged femme fatale whose virtue suffers collateral damage when the bombs hit Berlin. Next she is a complicated schoolteacher whose life unravels when she can’t resist a steamy affair with a 15-year-old student in Notes on a Scandal. The film, which co-stars the always incredible Judi Dench, finished shooting on a Friday; on Monday, Blanchett was at work on the set of The Good German, prepared to hit the ground running because she’d learned her lines at night, after shooting her Scandal scenes all day. When that film wrapped she couldn’t resist taking on just one more “once-in-a-lifetime” role—portraying the complicated Bob Dylan (no, that’s not a misprint) in Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There. Later in 2007 she reprises her role as the complicated Queen Elizabeth in Shekhar Kapur’s The Golden Age, opposite Clive Owen, and has signed on for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (again opposite Pitt), slated for a 2008 release. It’s safe to say that her character, Daisy, will be… complicated.
From the preponderance of evidence, Cate Blanchett is one driven actor. Tonight, after these interviews conclude, she will fly to London to do more press before finally taking the long journey back home to Sydney, the other end of the world and the other end of her perpetually burning candle, where she would no doubt collapse on a couch for a week or so if not for those two previously mentioned young kids.
When they usher me into her suite and she rises to extend her hand it occurs to me that very few actors look better in person than they do on screen, but Cate Blanchett is one of them. It’s not that the camera doesn’t love her, but she has an unconventional—complicated—beauty that lends itself more to certain cinematographers, certain lenses and certain lighting set-ups than others. No such distinction needs to be made in real life. She’s long of leg, completely relaxed, utterly elegant and disarmingly attractive. She smiles, shakes my hand and slumps casually, almost submissively, onto the couch, an expert at reading people and applying the friendly blowtorch of her personality to the ice.
I have a successful actor friend who likes to talk about his early days in the business, when he couldn’t land a plum role no matter how hard he tried. He got a few of the roles he could take or leave, but never the great ones—the ones he really coveted that could take him places. He agonized about what he was doing wrong for a long time and then, after a particularly painful audition, it dawned on him: The secret was not about what he did or didn’t do, it was about what he wanted. He finally figured out that projecting beyond the moment was disastrous; he needed to concentrate on the role, not what it might lead to. Basically, he couldn’t invest too much of himself before he got the part; he couldn’t want it too much.
What does any of this have to do with Cate Blanchett? Her success comes in part from knowing all of the above from day one. Consciously or not, she has always been in on the secret—that “directors can smell desperation,” as she puts it. So she never breaks a sweat. Or, if she ever does, you and I are certainly not going to be the ones to see it.
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Timothy Rhys (MM): You’re so relaxed and poised.
Cate Blanchett (CB): Well, I don’t know about that.
MM: So I’ve been reading a lot of old interviews with you.
CB: They’re all lies.
MM: Can’t be—you say some of the same things...
CB: Yeah, well, I think that’s a product of syndication.
MM: Okay, so these three movies being released on the heels of one another—Babel, Notes on a Scandal, The Good German… You’ve had this happen at least once before.
CB: Have I?
MM: Most recently with Heaven, The Lord of the Rings and Veronica Guerin…
CB: But I think Miramax buried Heaven, because it came out right after 9/11.
MM: I guess I was lucky to have seen it in a theater.
CB: It was out for about a week.
MM: So is this coincidental, or do you try to set your life up like this because you have kids? In other words, do you kind of consciously sprint through work so that you have time off? I’m just curious about how you so expertly seem to juggle your personal and professional lives.
CB: I wish it were that organized. No, I made Babel, which was three weeks; I succumbed to Alejandro’s flattery. But it was an extraordinary project and you didn’t need to be a rocket scientist to see that. He’s a master director, and the fact that this was a combination of a loose trilogy of films, the other two of which I thought were also extraordinary, it was something I really wanted to be a part of and in my small way help facilitate.
In terms of Notes on a Scandal and The Good German, roles like that just don’t come up very often. At first it looked like the two projects could work out because Soderbergh was going really quickly on to Shane and needed to go at the end of the year, but he pushed back and Richard Eyre pushed forward. What it meant for me was literally leaving the Notes on a Scandal set on a Friday in North London and beginning work on Monday on The Good German. That was not the most satisfying adrenaline rush… I was preparing for The Good German at night. It was like doing night school after the kids had gone to bed and after shooting all day on Notes on a Scandal. But the mise en scenés of the two films were polar opposites—the performance styles were polar opposites. One was intensely sort of modern and current (Notes on a Scandal) and the other was drawing on a much more outward, pre-Method performance style of the ’40s. So I was hopefully absorbing through osmosis that style by watching Ingrid Bergman. I watched Notorious many, many times, and Garbo and Dietrich and Hedy Lamarr and Hildegard Knef…
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This story was published in the Winter 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
The Golden Age of Cate Blanchett
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