Category: Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett doesn’t get a ton of tabloid interest, even though she’s very well-known and well-connected. In the past decade, I believe Cate and her family have lived full-time in England, where they have a country estate. Cate is constantly working and traveling though – she’s got beauty contracts, fashion contracts, and she’s always showing up for fashion designer friends and various palace events too. She’s got a steady stream of TV projects and films as well. All of that, and she works consistently in theater in London, New York and Sydney. I would think that the larger problem is that Cate is really burned out from working and traveling so much. Maybe that burnout is what inspired her to make these comments:

Actress Cate Blanchett has said she is “serious about giving up acting” as there are “lots of things I want to do with my life”.

The 55-year-old is preparing to star in her first radio drama in BBC Radio 4’s The Fever and told the Radio Times she is still not totally comfortable with being a celebrity.

She said: “My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it. I am serious about giving up acting. (There are) a lot of things I want to do with my life.”

The Australian most recently starred in the spy thriller Black Bag (2025), and has won two Oscars for best supporting actress in The Aviator (2005) and best actress in Blue Jasmine (2013).

Speaking about her experience of being a celebrity she added: “When you go on a talk show, or even here now, and then you see soundbites of things you’ve said, pulled out and italicised, they sound really loud. I’m not that person. I make more sense in motion – it’s been a long time to remotely get comfortable with the idea of being photographed. I’ve always felt like I’m on the periphery of things, so I’m always surprised when I belong anywhere. I go with curiosity into whatever environment that I’m in, not expecting to be accepted or welcomed. I’ve spent a lifetime getting comfortable with the feeling of being uncomfortable.”

[From The Evening Standard]

As I said, Cate works at an insane pace. Her IMDB page has been bonkers for years. Cate and Nicole Kidman are similar in that way – they like to say “yes” to people and help get smaller projects off the ground. Cate is even more hardcore because she’s regularly doing plays as well. Anyway, instead of retiring, maybe Cate should compromise and maybe just limit herself to one project a year? That might help with the burnout. And she doesn’t have to show up for ALL of those fashion events, just sayin’.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.

Over the years, it’s become abundantly clear that the only value Prince William places on the Earthshot Awards is being able to get photo-ops with celebrities. In 2022, he didn’t even invite the prize winners to the ceremony – all of the winners had to Zoom into the show while William gurned and egged his way through the big celebrity meet-up. In 2023, Hannah Waddingham, Lana Condor and Cate Blanchett were tasked with flying to Singapore to stroke William’s ego and pose with the “hot single dad.” In 2024, it was even worse, as William was pretty much exposed for calling up random models like Heidi Klum and asking them to come to South Africa for photo-ops with Peg. Incidentally, I absolutely believe that most (if not all) of the celebrities turning up at Earthshot Prize award ceremonies are getting paid hefty appearance fees.

Well, to hear Cate Blanchett tell it, she’s in it for the love of environmentalism. Cate has absolutely become more interested in environmentalism and sustainable fashion over the years, and I assume that she genuinely believes that Earthshot is an okay program and her support doesn’t come with a price tag. Which is probably why Earthshot people probably begged her to do this dumb interview:

Individuals must not be made to feel burdened with solving climate change alone, Cate Blanchett has said, as she praises the Prince of Wales’s Earthshot Prize. Blanchett, the Oscar-winning actress, said that the “overwhelming nature of the climate challenge can lead to despair, but we don’t have time for apathy and inaction”.

Noting that it is “really important to recognise that many people are struggling” themselves, she told the Telegraph: “Climate can feel like yet another burden to take on – that no one individual can make the changes needed to turn things around. But,” she added, “(and it’s a big but!) collectively, we do have power. Small actions do add up. The way we consume does add up.”

Blanchett, who attended the 2023 awards in Singapore, praised the awards for recognising “innovations that are not only game changing but rapidly scalable… The Prize, I feel, is a real injection of energised hope,” she said.

In an interview with the Telegraph while she was in the UK starring in The Seagull at the Barbican, Blanchett spoke of the “mess” of climate change, and the importance of working together across the globe to find solutions.

”To pit the economy and environment and our humanity against each other is a retreat to the kind of outdated, failed ideological thinking that got us into this mess in the first place, not what’s needed to get us out of it,” she said. “The first lesson that a disaster, a crisis, teaches us, is that everything is connected.”

The Earthshot Prize, she said, “recognises the interwoven nature of the problem – that advances in one corner of the world have ripple effects in others. The interconnected nature of the Prize is part of its power.”

[From The Telegraph]

I honestly don’t have a problem with Cate’s general sentiments, that it’s not about siloed individuals, banging their heads against the wall about the environment. It’s about working together towards shared environmental goals as a society. I can understand how Cate looks at Earthshot like “eh, it’s better than nothing.” But again…William doesn’t even speak about Earthshot this way, nor is he capable of expressing these kinds of sentiments. He’s literally just doing it to hang out with famous people and try to convince everyone that supermodels are dying to hang out with him.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.

Cate Blanchett went through the entire awards-season rigamarole in 2022 and 2023 with Tár. I was really rooting for her at the 2023 Oscars, but she lost to Michelle Yeoh. I was happy with Yeoh’s win, although I think people will look back on Tár and wonder how the hell Cate lost to anyone that season. In any case, Cate has eight Oscar nominations and two wins. She has eight BAFTA noms and four wins. Twelve Golden Globe noms and four wins. You get the idea – Cate has been to a lot of awards shows for many, many years, starting in the 1990s. She knows how to work an awards season, she knows how to walk a red carpet, and she knows that she’s really f–king tired of all of it, especially the televised awards shows. So she has an idea: stop televising the shows??? It will never happen, but hear her out:

Cate Blanchett would prefer awards shows not to be aired on television. The two-time Oscar-winning actress made a recent appearance on the Las Culturistas With Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang podcast, where she suggested that the Oscars should “go back to the day when it wasn’t televised.”

The conversation started when Blanchett noted that there are “so few spaces that you can go now, where you are private,” without phones and the risk of someone recording you. “That’s what I loved about the late ’80s [was] going to all of the dance parties in Sydney for Mardi Gras. People were just there. They were so present, you know, they were just together, collectively, having a great time. It was non-aggressive. No one was being recorded. No one cared what anyone did.”

Hosts Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang proceeded to note how privacy is even more difficult in the era of TikTok, especially with the viral trend of lip readers analyzing celebrity moments during televised awards shows and other events.

“But now it feels like that chasm between that kind of event, that ideal, is widening from the thing that’s very common now at, like, an awards show where you’ve got lip readers, you’re being photographed,” Yang said before a confused Blanchett interjected, “Lip readers?”

The co-hosts explained the trend, which sees TikTokers trying to guess what celebrities are saying to each other at awards shows. “And it looks like it could be exactly what they’re saying, in a way that’s a little bit odd,” Rogers said. Yang added that the lip-reading trend makes Hollywood events feel more “treacherous,” to which the Black Bag actress agreed.

“I mean, I say, I know it’s blasphemy, go back to the day when it wasn’t televised,” Blanchett suggested. “Bring that back and just have a great party where people can just let go. I mean the industry is so scattered and at such a point…which I think potentially could be exciting or could really be depressing, but it’s at a pivot point, and so we need to gather together and celebrate what it is that we do, without it having to have any public-facing.”

She continued, “I mean, the fashion is great, and all of that stuff. We’ll find out in the end who won or who didn’t win. But it would be so nice that that happened behind closed doors. [It would be] absolutely a very different evening.”

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

I’ve been watching awards shows for so long, I remember a time when actors were regularly drunk off their asses at the Golden Globes, to the point where they would give hilarious, off-the-cuff sh-thoused acceptance speeches. I remember Jack Nicholson winning a Globe, stumbling up to the microphone and telling a long-winded story about how alcohol-infused the Globes USED TO BE. While I don’t think Cate’s suggestion will be considered seriously, I would like to see a conversation about the need to shake up the awards-show format in general. There are too many “shows” and Cate’s right, a couple of them could stand to be untelevised and ALL of them could be shorter.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Backgrid.