If you know you are going to fail, then fail gloriously.
The Atlantic Tár Has an Answer to Art’s Toughest Question
Rolling Stones: Is Cate Blanchett Our Greatest Living Actor?
The revelations of Cate Blanchett
For her next role, Cate Blanchett is… “Oh God,” cries the Australian actress, “I look like a vampire!
I look like I’m about to play the organ!” She is sitting late one night in the study of her home in the English countryside, and it’s true, the mood is gothic with a touch of eco-spiritual, with two small owl totems looming behind her. The surroundings are very dark, and more to the point, she is wearing black, pointed, thick-rimmed glasses that make the actress, one of Hollywood’s most beautiful women, look like she’s auditioning for a highbrow reboot of Elvira: Mistress of the Dark. Luckily, she’s smiling.
Blanchett, 53, is home after a long day spent filming her latest project, Disclaimer will add to a lengthy list of achievements, including Oscar-winning turns in Blue Jasmine and The Aviator, two Oscar-nominated takes on Elizabeth I, roles in other films such as Carol, Hanna and The Lord of the Rings, plus TV series like Stateless or Mrs America. A theatre actress by training, she has starred in a slew of ambitious stage productions as well, not least when she co-ran the Sydney Theatre Company with her husband, Andrew Upton. She shares her British home (and others across the world) with him, their three sons and daughter, and her mother.
Blanchett wears Louis Vuitton double-breasted wool coat, £4,000, wool blazer, £2,330, and matching trousers, £1,460, cotton/silk shirt, £1,460, silk tie, £275, and white- and yellow-gold and diamond Fantasy necklace and ring. Throughout: Louis Vuitton high jewellery, POA, from the Spirit collection © Julia Noni
Blanchett will star in two films this season, one of which has already placed her as a leading contender in the annual awards-season circuit.
Tár is a virtuoso piece written and directed by Todd Field that showcases the actress as Lydia Tár, a complicated music conductor who, approaching 50 and preparing a seminal performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, is also careening towards a gigantic personal reckoning. It really is a showcase: Blanchett is in every single scene. “Look,” she admits, “it was one of the most extraordinarily intense and revelatory experiences I have ever had.”
Artistic with a capital “A”, ambitious, elusive, refusing easy definitions but eye-wateringly committed, the performance arguably sums up the actress herself.
“No, not with Cate in mind. I wrote it for Cate, and only Cate. Of course, she didn’t know that,” says the maker of Little Children, who has been absent from our screens for 16 years. The two had met several years ago with an eye to collaborating on a film Field had written with Joan Didion, but nothing came of it.
Instead, the meeting left Field with “the impression of an individual operating at the pitch of perception, someone who possessed the kind of wit and intelligence one rarely, if ever, encounters. An honest-to-God genius. So, who better to play a genius?” Faced with all this, Blanchett struggles to discuss Tár: “I don’t think I’ve quite processed it, to be honest. It doesn’t happen very often.” Part of preparing for the role involved her conducting full orchestras in certain scenes. “It’s a completely different way of viewing the world through sound – and to play someone who has such an acute sensitivity to sound.”
More bluntly, though, Tár is about someone reaching the top and realising they’ve come horribly close to the edge. We see Lydia promote and dismiss colleagues, teach and argue with students, ponder the nature and needs of art – and try to ignore the manic emails of a former protégée; she has form, it seems, in blurred relationships with female acolytes. Yet to call it a lesbian #MeToo movie, or an indictment of the patriarchal classical music scene, would be to severely misread it.
“It’s much more existential than that,” says Blanchett, who herself is the star of a thousand TikToks obsessing about her sexuality.
(A question as to whether she has heard of a cult Insta account called “dykeblanchett”, which likes to give a Sapphic twist to her every move, brings bafflement, then a honk of laughter, and then a hint of concern: “Am I fully clothed?)” “Tàr has that painful, painful moment – which I hope you have in adolescence, because, my God, you want to have that feeling early – the painful discovery that you are not who you think you are.
And in fact, the way people perceive you is entirely different, often, to the way you move through the world. That’s why social media is such a strange, anxiety-ridden hall of mirrors – because we try to control the things we simply cannot control.” As to what Tàr herself has done right or wrong, “I don’t want to define it,” says Blanchett, a warm conversationalist who likes to give rattling, rambling answers, bouncing around all sides of a question before alighting on a cautious conclusion.
“But I think, in the end, she’s on the run from herself… because you can’t outrun yourself. You can think you’re a Great Dane – but if you’re a chihuahua, it is far better to look that in the eye, and work with that chihuahua!” Otherwise, “that unexamined chihuahua, whatever it is, is going to wake you up at 3am and strangle you!”
All of which begs the question: what has she been on the run from? A vast pause. “My kids are constantly saying to me how restless I am and how I need to sit still. They absolutely love it when I am in my pyjamas – when I don’t get dressed.” She is, she admits, “always heading to the next destination – and it can be tiring at times.” But then, “there’s so much to do in the world, and so many conversations to have, so many fascinating people to meet, that I do find it hard to say: ‘No – I’m staying in my pyjamas today.’ I don’t know if that’s running from something.”
She certainly ran towards another opportunity to work with Guillermo del Toro, for whom she is voicing the sprightly Spazzatura, the lovely monkey in his stop-motion-animated remake of Pinocchio; the second time they’ve worked together after last year’s Nightmare Alley. It was an especially pleasing role for Blanchett, an actor (and a person) who loves to play against type. “We all have those conversations where people go: I know who you are.
You’re this. And you immediately go: am I? Or, I’m not all that. It makes you want to stretch out in another direction.” She was further delighted when del Toro announced that he thought she was, innately, a “foul-mouthed 12-year-old boy”. “Cate has a tremendous sense of humour and can be the most thoughtful friend and collaborator,” says the director via email. “She can unleash full force into wild energy. She said to me that Spazzatura was her spirit animal. I believe it!” It is 24 years since Blanchett burst onto international screens, aged 29, in Elizabeth, a sumptuous period piece that affirmed her regal qualities.
She’s been a famous actress for as long as she’s been married. “I’ve been married for 25 years – it’s a miracle,” she says simply. Did she expect to have that kind of relationship? “I honestly don’t think I had a game plan.” Blanchett was the second of three children growing up in Melbourne’s suburbs. When her father, a US naval chief petty officer turned ad man, died of a heart attack when she was 10, she was brought up by her teacher mother and grandmother. She first studied economics and fine arts at Melbourne University, before dropping out for a year, travelling, and then enrolling at a theatre school in Sydney when she was 20.
“I wasn’t one of those people who thought: I must have children, or I want to be in a relationship, or I want to be an actor. I didn’t have any of those thoughts at all,” she says. “It was literally one experience rolled into another. I mean, you asked about what was revelatory about playing Tár. To play someone who was that driven, that consumed by the fire of needing to make music, and someone who is that self-possessed, was an extraordinary experience.”
Would she really not say she had that drive? Considering her CV, you’d imagine that… “What? I look like a driven person?” She seems borderline appalled at the idea. “Not at all! Not at all,” she insists. “I think it’s more of a compulsion than a drive, and I think there’s a difference… If I’m running away from anything, it’s keeping doing it.”
Blanchett’s protean quality in acting has also made her perfect for fashion. Few of the bigger stars can pull off both a delicately frilled gown or a manly tux, but she can do both with ease (indeed Tár is, among other things, a feast of slouchy masculine tailoring). It’s why everyone from Giorgio Armani (who paid her a reported $10mn in 2013 to be the face of his perfume Sì) to, latterly, Nicolas Ghesquière and Francesca Amfitheatrof at Louis Vuitton has designated her a muse. She became a Vuitton ambassador this summer.
At the start of her career, Blanchett starred in David Mamet’s Oleanna, which is often cited as a proto-#MeToo play. With its similar concerns with sex, age and power, it forms an interesting counterpoint with Tár.
Has Blanchett seen much change or progress in the intervening decades? “On one level, yes. I think women feel much more mobilised. My generation was brought up by another generation of women, a lot of whom felt the backlash for calling themselves feminists, and so were worried about their daughters being proactive.” This, she says, is over. “But then you look at what’s happening with reproductive freedom and you think, well…” She peters out. “Look. I am positive that changes are happening – but the people who are holding onto power do not want to let go.”
As causes go, however, she has even more pressing things in mind.
An active climate spokesperson, Blanchett co-hosts a podcast, Climate of Change, with her friend Danny Kennedy, for which she has interviewed William, the Prince of Wales, former Irish president Mary Robinson and the historian and author Rutger Bregman in a bid to find potential solutions. “First of all, we’ve got to make sure we’re not going to burn,” she says. “Hopefully, we will make the transition from a fossil-fuel driven economy to a more circular one in the next three or four years – otherwise I don’t know what to tell my children.” Even an innocuous question about her love of gardening – she and her mother may go harvest the tomatoes tomorrow – lurches into a near-apocalyptic fear of droughts. “When you ask me about it, I kind of get a lump in my throat,” she murmurs. “I’m very water-obsessed.” Despite all this, Blanchett doesn’t leave you feeling doomy; she is so animated, so inquisitive and so voluble that you get the sense there’s always a solution.
And watching a film like Tár, you’re reminded that she still has much to do. “You know those monkey bars?” she asks. “I had a friend at drama school who described happiness. They said that in the process of letting go of one hand, you swing to grab another, and in that swing is pure joy. I’ve experienced that when you fall in love, or any moment when you’re in full unfettered flow in life, and they’re rare. But I have also experienced it on stage, and in rehearsal rooms, and in making movies like Tár.” The addictive thing, she explains, “is wanting to feel that flow again. So maybe it’s not what I’m running from,” she says, reaching a conclusion – for now. “Maybe it’s what I’m running towards.”
Pinocchio is on Netflix from December; Tár will be in cinemas on 13 January in the UK
New Cate Blanchett interviews & TÁR preview in London on New Year’s Eve
Here are some parts of the interview with Cate by Olly Richards.
If you’re ever having a nice chat with Cate Blanchett and want to stop it dead in its tracks, ask her about acting.
It’s like throwing a bucket of water over her. “I couldn’t be less interested in talking about it,” she says, slowly folding her arms as if this might deflect the question. She would rather talk about anything else. She’d like to talk about her garden (her onions are doing well). She’d like to talk about how amazing it is that we’re standing about 15 metres from where The Beatles recorded (we’re in Abbey Road Studios, which we’ll explain later). Just please, oh God, not acting. Unfortunately, we’re going to make her talk about it because, you may have noticed, she’s really very good at it. And in her new film she’s about the best at it she’s ever been.
The list of great Cate Blanchett performances is not short. It’s pretty much a list of all Cate Blanchett’s performances. After 1997’s Oscar and Lucinda she was talked of as a talent to watch. The next year she played Elizabeth I and showed she was a talent you couldn’t tear your eyes from. So it’s been ever since, The Aviator, Notes on A Scandal, Blue Jasmine, Carol. You might find some duff films on her CV, but you won’t find a duff performance.
TÁR, though, sees Blanchett operating on a different level. She’s ripping through layers of a complicated, troubled woman in a way that leaves you wrung out just spectating. It’s like watching Whitney Houston sing or Gene Kelly dance. You know they’re made of approximately all the same bits as you, but it’s impossible to fathom how they’ve been able to put them to much more remarkable use. At 53, Blanchett is doing the most astonishing work of her career.
The reason we’re at Abbey Road is because Field and Blanchett are, in a very meta move, making a concept album inspired by Tár’s planned Mahler album. Blanchett is readying to conduct the Dresden Philharmonic (the orchestra in the film), who will arrive tomorrow. Their chairs are set up, expectantly awaiting orchestral bottoms. “It’s all in the breath,” says Blanchett, waving her hand gently in the air. “If you stop breathing, you break the communication with the orchestra, You stop thinking when you stop breathing.”
She will talk about conducting for as long as you like. She spent months studying it — the right hand keeps tempo; the left instructs the orchestra — as well as learning to play the piano so well that she could interpret Bach piece in multiple ways. She likes to talk about the brilliant people who taught her things, but resist any talk of her own skills. We try to take her back to the first note of her performance. As it turns out, becoming Lydia Tár began as all Blanchett’s favorite roles do: with absolute terror and confusion.
Back in 2012, Field was writing a political thriller with Joan Didion. It fell through but not before he’d spoken to Blanchett about playing the lead. She lurked at the edges of his mind for years, until in 2020 he began writing TÁR. The character kept assuming a familiar face. “I didn’t tell anyone. I didn’t tell the studio. They thought I was writing this about a man. I thought, ‘How do I want to tell this story?’ And I thought it had to be a woman… it’s Cate.”
He was terrified about actually asking, but sent her the script, which he never does before meeting an actor. When Blanchett received it, she was just as frightened. She had no idea what she was expected to do with this woman.
“It was mind-blowing,” says Blanchett. “Because I didn’t know what it was. That, for me, is the most exciting and dangerous way to start a project. Often when you read something you can admire it, but if you know exactly what it is, then you should hand it over to someone else, because it’s already made in your head. I had no idea how to approach this.”
Blanchett never really stops preparing. She has an iPad full of bits of characters; pages of notes, links and clips that make sense only to her but might one day become a fragment of a character’s life. They might not have been assigned to a particular character when she saves them. “You never know where the key to a character lies,” she says. “Sometimes its in a conversation, in a piece of music you listen to, or a gesture someone did.” She laughs as she remembers one of the references for TÁR.
That iPad is a place for new characters to gestate, but also a sort of crypt for the ones who never made it. She can’t bring herself to delete them. She recently found a file she’d made for Lady Marchmain in Brideshead Revisited, which she was going to make with Luca Guadagnino. “I thought, ‘I should delete this, because it’s not going to happen now.” But I was reading it on a train and I thought, ‘There are interesting thoughts. Who knows what they’re going to become?'”
Blanchett loves to have her own ideas confronted. “To be in agreement all the time, to be in a room where everyone thinks the same way or speaks the same way, I’ll run a mile. I think that’s what’s wrong with democracy at the moment. We’ve lost that robust townhall debate.” She brings it all back neatly to music and conducting. “You can only hear harmony if you’ve heard discord,” she says. “You’ve got to tune the instrument.”
Blanchett has been tuning her instrument for over 25 years now. In the quarter of a century since her first movie, Paradise Road, she’s racked up 60 film acting credits, not including short films or television. That’s a lot. Tom Cruise only has 47 and he’s been going 16 years longer. Julia Roberts has 52. Famously prolific Nicole Kidman has 68, with a 14-year head start. Blanchett gasps when we tell her the number. “Terrible!” Well, it definitely isn’t terrible, but it does suggest someone who needs to work. “I do find it hard to say no,” she says. “Some things I should have said no to.” She never really lets herself stop working and isn’t sure what she’d do if she did. “I need to develop some hobbies,” she says. “But I suppose work is my hobby. Or it’s a compulsion.”
“I reserve the right to walk away,” she says with mock imperiousness. “Everyone has a different relationship with work, but I do need to be seduced back into it.” So it’s not that she has a compulsion to work for the sake of work, but that she keeps getting seduced. And she likes to be seduced rather than the seducer. She still has a big list of directors she wants to work with — Ari Aster, Jane Campion, Park Chan-wook, Kelly Reichardt — but she hasn’t let them know. “I’m quite shy,” she says. The only one she’s not shy with is Scorsese, who directed her in The Aviator. “Every time I see him I say, ‘Come on. I’m not getting any younger. When are you going to make a film with a fucking woman at the centre?'” She says it so fiercely, you have to assume Scorsese is somewhere writing in a panic right now.
