Cate Blanchett plans to give up acting: 'There are things I want to do with my life'

“You had to think about that,” says the man sitting beside her, theatre director John Tiffany. “I did, didn’t I?” Blanchett replies. “It’s because I’m giving up.”

Giving up?

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

Hopefully not immediately. We are, after all, sitting in Blanchett’s dressing room at the Barbican in London where she is seven performances away from the end of an applauded run of Chekhov’s The Seagull, in which the Australian two-time Oscar winner plays the faded, jaded actress Arkadina.

On the dressing room door, a piece of A4 paper bears the legend “CB” in a 50-point font while the view from the dressing window is of the Brutalist Barbican’s multi-storey car park. Glamorous it is not. But still Blanchett sits, amid the mundanity, looking lit from within. Like you hope a movie star would.

She also looks a bit distracted. Absent, almost. She doesn’t love doing interviews. “No one is more boring to me than myself and I find other people much more interesting,” she says. “I find myself profoundly dull.”

Later, I’ll ask her if she agrees with the author John Updike who said that “celebrity is a mask that eats into the face” and she’ll reply: “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.” She wrinkles her nose. “I’m not that person.”

So what sort of person is she? Restless, she says. “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.”

Now in her 50s, how comfortable is she, sitting with herself, being present? “How long have you got?” she says, archly, before advocating cold water swimming – taken up after a recent trip to the Arctic – as a way to feel incredibly present. “The only way through is the breath,” she says. The trick is to keep breathing, then.

Blanchett has previously said that having her customary cold shower in the morning is “maybe the one time of the day, apart from being on stage, where I’m truly – and this is a terrible thing to admit – truly present”. On stage, she tells me, “You have to have this sort of sonic sweep, like a submarine, in terms of the quality of your listening and your presence. Theatre lives or dies based on your connection to the audience and listening to how they’re responding and trying to bring them with you, and also your connection with the ensemble that you’re working with. That listening is so intense. I have to really focus on bringing the same quality of listening into my life.”

Then, almost as an aside, Blanchett muses: “I think I’m quite pleasant in the rehearsal room. I’m much more unbearable in life.”

Of her life, Blanchett says, “Like a lot of people, I like being alive. I throw myself into life, often in unwanted places. Maybe that’s why my career, if you call it a career, has been so strangely eclectic.” (Note to Ms Blanchett: you can definitely call it a career.)

From ethereal Galadriel in The Lord of the Rings and leather-clad goddess Hela in Thor: Ragnarok to the tragic, enigmatic, sapphic Carol and her Oscar-winning turn in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, Blanchett’s range reaches from blockbuster to arthouse. And with her towering performance in 2022’s Tár as the flawed conductor and world’s best-dressed predatory lesbian, Blanchett nailed the arthouse blockbuster.

What Blanchett hadn’t done hitherto was any radio drama, despite the place and spaces that radio occupies in her life.

“I’m obsessed with the psychological space that is the interior of people’s cars,” she says. “Often the most profound and intense and memorable conversations that I have with my children are in the car. There’s a psychological cone, a collective cone, when you’re all travelling together. It’s the songs you sing on the way on holiday, the stories and the jokes you tell – and the radio you listen to. That special space was where my 16-year-old encountered Desert Island Discs and now he’s completely obsessed with it, and, because the school run is quite long, it’s where I listen to long-form radio drama.”

If she ever watched or listened to her own work – which she doesn’t – Blanchett could, this Saturday, listen to The Fever by Wallace Shawn. Directed by John Tiffany, winner of two Tonys and two Oliviers, and his frequent collaborator Steven Hoggett, The Fever is a 90-minute monologue in which an unnamed traveller (Blanchett) falls ill in a foreign country riven by civil war. Racked with fever, she comes to realise that her developed-world comfort and privilege are paid for by the suffering and oppression of those in the developing world. It is a brutal, beautiful denunciation of global capitalism in which we are all complicit.

“When I first heard it, I felt ambushed by it,” she says. “Urgent and demanding, a dialogue with the self that asks some rather uncomfortable questions. It’s also incredibly intimate, which makes it perfect for radio.”

Blanchett says her character “gives voice to an inner monologue that I think a lot of us are ashamed to say we have,” arguing that shame can be incredibly useful. “There are lots of things that I am ashamed to admit, even to myself, even to my inner voice, but if we act on and confront what we are ashamed about, then we can continue to grow.”

She sounds hopeful. “I am hopeful,” she declares. “But when empathy is being described as a negative [as Elon Musk did last month], we are in deep trouble.”

So how does she stay hopeful? “I have four children,” she says, plainly. “There’s no time for hopelessness. I’m not being Pollyanna-ish, nor am I saying I have the answers, but we have to preserve the spaces where we can find common ground and talk to one another and not submit to fear. Fevers break.”

Blanchett is under no illusions about the potential impact of The Fever. As the traveller herself says, “Artists who create works of art that inspire sympathy and good values don’t change the life of the poor.”

The actress herself says, “It’s a conversational opener. If one person has an epiphany? Amazing. But sometimes these things come, like it did with me, at 3am two weeks after I’d read it. I was up all night. Why am I thinking about this? Why? And I kept going back to it…”

Is she ready for the “Who does Cate Blanchett think she is?” backlash that may come when sections of the media take umbrage at someone famous denouncing the system that made them famous? “When I start speaking in a defensive way like that, it’s because I’ve been affected by something and I don’t want to look at it. One expects it with a piece like this.” She shoots me a steely look.

Oh, Cate Blanchett, actress (for now anyway) is ready for whatever comes.

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