Academy Award-winning Australian actress Cate Blanchett has revealed that her acting was once labelled “s..t” by an acclaimed Hollywood director. The 57-year-old star shared the candid anecdote during an interview at the Cannes Film Festival, where she discussed the Displacement Film Fund she co-founded to support displaced filmmakers.
Blanchett recalls harsh criticism on set of Babel
Reflecting on the 2006 film Babel, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, Blanchett recounted a tense moment during one of her first scenes. Already shaken by a family emergency—her son had been in an accident in Morocco—she found herself facing blunt feedback from the director.
“I remember the first day we shot, Brad Pitt and I shot a scene, and we did a couple of takes, and Iñárritu came up and said, ‘This is s..t. What is this s..t?’” Blanchett said, as reported by news.com.au. “He said, ‘There’s nothing here. This scene has to work or the movie doesn’t work,’ and walked off.”
Blanchett, who had already won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role in The Aviator two years earlier, described the moment as disorienting. “That knocks you off your centre,” she said. “It’s a form of direction. Some say, ‘That’s incredibly disrespectful,’ or ‘That’s upsetting to me.’ But sometimes a director can lead with love, but incredibly tough love.”
She even mused that a particular look she gives in the film’s final scene might have been influenced by fear of further criticism. “Maybe that look was also just me frightened that Iñárritu was gonna come in and say, ‘It’s s..t’ to me again,” she added.
Iñárritu was nominated for an Oscar for directing Babel and later won consecutive Academy Awards for Birdman (2015) and The Revenant (2016).
Age and physical limitations in acting
In the same interview, Blanchett acknowledged that she can no longer approach roles with the same physical energy as in her younger years. “As you get older, the palette that you’re playing upon gets perhaps more calcified and less malleable, so there’s a lot of stuff you cannot do,” she said. “I used to be able to tap dance. I can’t really tap dance anymore. The sad thing is I’ve got a facility for learning things quickly, but then I have a sort of physical dementia and I forget it.”
Concerns about the #MeToo movement
The Blue Jasmine star also expressed disappointment over the fading momentum of the #MeToo movement, claiming it was “getting killed very quickly” in Hollywood. “There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say ‘this has happened to me’. And the so-called average woman on the street, person on the street, is saying me too. Why does that get shut down?” she questioned.
