Here are interviews with Cate Blanchett as part of the promo for the live action adaptation of the video game, BORDERLANDS directed by Eli Roth, in cinemas on 9 August. Also, check out the stills and behind the scenes (photos from Jamie Lee Curtis).

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Borderlands stars unearth secrets from Pandora

Director Eli Roth and his star-studded cast recount the decade-long quest to bring juggernaut video game “Borderlands” to the big screen.

The story of Borderlands the movie is really a case study in madness.

And perhaps you need a touch of lunacy to spend over a decade bashing your head against the wall trying to translate the psychedelic video game world of Pandora (not the Avatar one) and its many treasure-seeking Vault Hunters for the big screen. But for the film’s cast — an unlikely assemblage of icons across the comedy, horror, prestige drama, and even Barbie spaces — it was more like cabin fever that drove them to it.

“It was seriously lockdown madness,” Cate Blanchett says of signing on with the likes of Jamie Lee Curtis, Kevin Hart, Jack Black, Florian Munteanu, and up-and-comer Ariana Greenblatt. “It was nothing I thought would ever cross my path, something as bonkers as this.”

With his stars on board, director Eli Roth was ready to begin production on his movie about an oddball group of misfits haphazardly thrown together on a quest to rescue the daughter of the most powerful man in the universe and find a lost vault containing ancient alien technology. At the time, the first wave of COVID-19 vaccines was only just becoming available, and everyone, including the soon-to-be castmates, was itching to re-enter the real world and stop disinfecting their groceries. “It was a chance to be physical and to be in a room with people, running around being stupid,” Blanchett continues. “We only had each other, so work was an absolute, joyous escape.”

Blanchett leads that group as Lilith, known in the game as a Siren, one with incredible powers. In the film, she’s an intergalactic hired gun who reluctantly heads back to her homeworld of Pandora when she’s tasked by Atlas (Edgar Ramírez), the head of an arms-dealing megacorporation, to extract his missing daughter. Lilith is one of the more popular figures from the video games, and not just because of her signature flaming red hair…though it certainly helps. After playing Borderlands briefly with her sons (“When it comes to video games, I may as well be playing with my feet,” she jokes), Blanchett fell down a rabbit hole of Lilith cosplayer photos online.

“It was the fan base that I found so fascinating,” she says. “The whole idea of cosplay — how idiosyncratic it is, the way different people would riff and give their Lilith — that I found really inspiring. It was a big cut-and-paste for me in trying to put her together on screen.”

Curtis didn’t even have to read the script to know she wanted to sign on to the film. “It didn’t matter to me,” she says. “I went to Budapest to be in a movie with Cate Blanchett.” The Halloween icon plays Dr. Patricia Tannis, a scientist and an old friend of Lilith’s mother. Curtis says she learned everything she needed while sitting next to Kristy Pitchford — Randy’s wife, and the creator of the Tannis video game character — on the flight to Hungary. “She explained that Tannis had objective sexuality, that she had autism, that she was not neurotypical, that she had these interesting points of view,” the actress recalls. “It helped me so much.”

Cate Blanchett on getting her Borderlands Lilith wig just right

Cate Blanchett knows there’s no such thing as “too much” in the highly stylized, cell-shaded world of Borderlands.

The actress tells Entertainment Weekly that she advocated for several changes to her character Lilith’s design in the upcoming film adaptation of the award-winning video games series after the fierce gunslinger’s look initially appeared a bit too soft for her liking. The first thing on her list? Getting her hairstylist, Kerry Warn, to create a swoopy, sculptural wig in the character’s signature red hue.

“We started off going pale pink and thinking, ‘Oh, it’s too extreme,’” Blanchett recalls. “And so I really did push for that fiery, almost sort of fluorescent red, because I just thought it was going to be great once we got out in the sunlight. I think everyone was a bit scared of it at first, about how extreme it was, but I’m glad we did it.” 

She also encouraged the costume department to roughen up Lilith’s outfit and add some of the character’s smaller accoutrements that she sports throughout the games.

“What I loved about Lilith was she’s a bit ripped up…. I really pushed to get a bit of shoulder pads and get the knee pads and — knowing that we were going to be in sunlight, but also in the darkness for a long time — having something that had a bit of sheen to it,” she explains. “It was important that it could withstand all those things and be interesting enough to follow through, but not distracting.” 

When it came to crafting her version of Lilith, Blanchett found inspiration in both the games and the Borderlands cosplay community. She spoke with several Lilith cosplayers as part of her research, exchanging notes and receiving makeup tutorials from them both on set and over Zoom.

“It was to go back to the fans, all the cosplay, and work out how they put their Lilith together, because there’s such an incredible ownership of these characters. So it was diving into the game, but it was also the fanbase that I found so fascinating,” she says. “The whole idea of cosplay and how idiosyncratic it is, the way different people would riff on their Lilith, I found really inspiring, actually. It was a big cut and paste for me in trying to put her together on screen.”

Cate Blanchett practiced conducting for Tár in full Lilith attire on Borderlands set

Picture it: Cate Blanchett channeling Lydia Tár while dressed as Lilith, the gunslinger with the fiery red hair from the Borderlands video games. Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t have to picture it. She saw it.

The Halloween horror icon has that distinct memory of her costar during the production of Borderlands, the Eli Roth-directed video game movie adaptation that shot in Budapest in 2021. Curtis says she would often glance over and see Blanchett sitting in her chair on set, wearing her full Lilith costume (wig and all), listening to music, and conducting an invisible orchestra with her hands.

“I was like, ‘What are you doing?'” Curtis recalls in an interview with Entertainment Weekly for our Borderlands-pegged Comic-Con cover story. “She said, ‘Oh, I have this job I’m going to next.'” That job was Tár, the 2022 film from filmmaker Todd Field starring the two-time Oscar winner as composer-conductor Lydia Tár. “She went straight to Berlin from Budapest,” Curtis, also an Oscar winner for Everything Everywhere All at Once, adds. “That’s how long ago we made this movie.”

“Perhaps if you’re doing two things that were vaguely similar, it might be a little bit confusing,” Blanchett tells EW in a separate interview of her experience, “but you couldn’t get two more diametrically opposed projects than Borderlands and Tár.”

Blanchett stars in Borderlands as Lilith, a hired gun who grew up on the lawless planet of Pandora, a place known for attracting Vault Hunters, those determined to find and crack open the treasures hidden within various vaults scattered around the wasteland terrain. When she’s hired to track down the missing daughter of the most powerful man in the galaxy, Lilith is forced to return to her old haunt.

Meanwhile, Tár, which would earn Blanchett another Oscar nomination in 2023, featured the actress as the celebrated first female director of a major German orchestra who faced accusations of misconduct. “I was so grateful, actually, to be in Budapest [filming Borderlands] because I met this incredible concert pianist who happened to have time because it was [COVID-19] lockdown, who took me into the Academy [of Music], who took me into the opera house,” Blanchett says. “That’s where I had my piano lessons and helped choose all the music, and I had my conducting lessons online on the weekend.”

Blanchett also remembers what Curtis talks about. “When you’re doing something as physical as this, you can only go up and down on a harness so many times before they have to turn the set around,” she says. “There’d often be an hour where I had the time to sit down and look at the score. I always thought I was going to do needlepoint or knitting, but no.”

sour AND sweet?! sounds like a handsome little steward bot that I know!!! pic.twitter.com/bAHLmuQYsi

— CLAPTRAP (@BorderlandsFilm) July 31, 2024

I’m sorry, was there a party I wasn’t invited to?! Experience #BorderlandsMovie THIS FRIDAY! pic.twitter.com/3NAD4txAFo

— CLAPTRAP (@BorderlandsFilm) August 3, 2024