Talking to the multi-award winning actress, it's evident that this Australian star isn't one for pretensions. She talks eloquently about her work, with the confidence and breadth of knowledge of someone who's devoted a large portion of her life to the arts.
Her latest project is Blue Jasmine, written and directed by Woody Allen, a man who's created many indelible female characters. Blanchett plays Jasmine (or Jeanette, as she was born).
"She was a girl who changed her name at school, so she already had a romanticised version of herself," says the actress.
The film introduces the New York socialite shortly after she's suffered a breakdown triggered by the cataclysmic collapse of her marriage to wealthy financier Hal (Alec Baldwin).
Until that point, Jasmine's entire identity was wrapped around being an elegant, immaculate and culturally sophisticated woman living the Manhattan high life. Now that's over, her mental and emotional state is rapidly veering off course.
Suffering for your art
"I was terrified and excited about accepting the role," admits Blanchett, 44. "It was such an incredible opportunity, so complicated, and there was so much to do, so many avenues to explore, her physical, as well as mental state.
"I mean what happens when you take [anti-depressant] Xanax and alcohol?" she says, laughing. "I had a little bit of vodka but I didn't do the Xanax! But it's amazing what you can find on YouTube."
Jasmine's freefall isn't dissimilar to that of Blanche DuBois' in Tennessee Williams's classic A Streetcar Named Desire. It's a comparison that hasn't escaped Blanchett, who portrayed Blanche on stage.
"The first time I read the script, I was sitting at the kitchen bench and saying to my husband, 'Oh, I wonder if Woody saw me'. He hadn't and he never mentioned it, but then Woody's sensibility as a writer is entirely different to Tennessee Williams's.
"He's much more urban, neurotic. He doesn't have that same lyricism that Tennessee does, that ephemeral nostalgia. Certainly, I think it's delicious that any parallels might exist, but they're incidental rather than deliberate."
Woody’s style
Allen is notoriously swift in his directorial style, usually completing a scene in one or two takes.
"Often Sally and I would say, 'Let's go again'," says Blanchett, referring to British actress Sally Hawkins, who plays Jasmine's adopted 'underdog' sister Ginger. "Woody would go, 'I think I've got it, but if you want to go again, go for it'."
Although Blue Jasmine is less whimsical that Allen's recent offerings, there are lighter moments, and Blanchett feels that's imperative.
"I find even when you're playing something like Hedda Gabler or Blanche, those immensely tragic trajectories they go on, you have to find the ridiculous, the absurd, because otherwise you don't earn the tragic," she says.
"I think that's something Woody innately understands. He understands how we always yearn for the wrong person, or we're so deluded to who we actually are. And I think therein lies the comedy.
"We all suffer from delusions of grandeur," she adds. "We're all the heroines or heroes in our own narrative and I, like anyone, have had those narcissistic moments, but Jasmine's much more interesting and complex than me."
Finding balance
It's why she doesn't see the point of being cast in a role and reducing it to her experiences. "The whole pleasure of being an actor is you go, 'Why do they do that?' It's like reading a great novel. You turn the page to try and work out why they're doing what they're doing."
She admits there are certain roles that can affect your "balance", however.
"There's a lot of talk in Woody's films, so there's a lot to get your head around," she explains. "I didn't sleep a lot. But while I think certain roles do affect you, you don't necessarily want other people to suffer for that."
Particularly her three sons, Dashiell, 12, Roman, nine, and five-year-old Ignatius.
"They're a great leveller," says the actress. "You go home at the end of the day and they just want you to put them to bed, do their homework, give them a bath."
While Blanchett has never considered herself "particularly method", she used to have more anxiety about roles when she was younger. "And then when you've given birth to a child you think, 'Oh God, nothing matters'. You learn to scale things."
Being an addict
The children have now joined her in Britain while she shoots Kenneth Branagh's Cinderella. He's another actor-director – like Allen and George Clooney, who helmed her upcoming movie The Monuments Men.
"They all come from entirely different places but the thing is they're all unpretentious and workman-like," says Blanchett, who'll soon be looking to prove her own worth behind the lens with her directorial debut, a dark thriller called The Dinner.
As successful as Blanchett is, she admits to thinking about changing her profession "every day".
"I'm like an addict," she says, laughing. "I feel I have to go into rehab and stop this silly business and get a real job."
Cate Blanchett: 'Woody Allen doesn’t want to get in an actor’s way'Actors who work with Woody Allen for the first time are all bemused by the short audition process he submits them to and, later, the lack of directorial instructions he issues once filming has begun.
But Cate Blanchett probably holds the record. Allen telephoned her in Australia, he offered her the title role in his latest movie Blue Jasmine, they talked for 45 seconds and, she recalls, he told her, “Great, you want to do it. I’ll see you in San Francisco.”
Then, during the filming his direction was limited to: “That’s awful,” or “That’s good,” she says, laughing. “I think he really doesn’t want to get in an actor’s way. When you work with Woody Allen, 97 per cent of his direction is in the script, and his word choices are so particular and he has such a rhythm to his writing that you have to rise to that.”
Jasmine is not an easy character to like and, says Blanchet, “A lot of what Jasmine says and does is shocking and narcissistic and unpalatable, but the thing that I hope humanises her is that she is someone with no centre who is desperately looking for her identity in other people. I think her heart’s in the right place.
“Woody has this gift of being able to make us laugh at the most painful things and find the most serious things utterly absurd. So the tone was one of the biggest challenges.”
There are strong similarities between the damaged and dysfunctional Jasmine and Blanche DuBois, the troubled woman at the center of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire, whom coincidentally Blanchett played in Liv Ullman’s off-Broadway production. “There are parallels to Streetcar in the setup but the way the characters interact, and the payoff, is quite, quite different,” she says. “It’s a Woody Allen creation. Woody’s writing is entirely different rhythmically and tonally to Tennessee Williams and I thought about all those Upper East Side women and the financial scandals as much as I thought about Blanche Dubois.”
Cate Blanchett, 44, is her usual cheerful, down-to-earth self when we talk at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. She is wearing a mauve dress with a wide collar and, fittingly for someone who prefers to wear jeans and tee-shirts, does not know the designer – “It’s just a dress,” she shrugs.
Two days previously she had finished her seven-week stint in a production of Jean Genet’s The Maids for the Sydney Theatre Company, of which she and her husband of 16 years, Andrew Upton, are joint artistic directors.
Surprisingly for such a highly regarded actress who has starred in so many high-profile films, she has kept her distance from Hollywood and barely gets recognised walking down the street, which suits her just fine.
“Some people lust for the public eye and find it helps them in their work and others don’t,” she says. “I guess I prefer to be quite private. It’s a myth that actors are exhibitionists. I don’t think all actors are. It’s the research and working with people that fascinates me.”
Unlike most of her fellow actresses, she cares little for her looks and is happy to play what she calls “ugly” roles. She considers the biggest compliment she ever received was when someone told her she had “an actor’s face.”
Her acting career began when she appeared as an extra in a film made in Egypt while she was traveling there as a teenager. On returning to Australia she enlisted in drama school without any high expectations. “I’d seen a lot of brilliant actors who didn’t work very often and when you’re starting out there’s more rejection than acceptance so I said I would give myself five years because I didn’t think I was strong enough to deal with the rejections,” she says.
“But I’ve been so incredibly lucky. My first job was at the Sydney Theatre Company working with Geoffrey Rush in a David Mamet play, Oleanna. Now I find myself in the position of being co-artistic director and CEO of the Sydney Theatre Company and about to make a film, Blackbird, with David Mamet. That is luck.”
Despite the critical praise and awards buzz that surrounds her she is never happy with her performances and has a rule that she never watches her movies more than once. “I’m eternally dissatisfied,” she says. “Maybe that’s why I keep working. I find it gets less excruciating watching myself because I’ve got used to it. But no, I’m endlessly disappointed.”
