Cate Blanchett attended the premiere of Vogue: Inventing The Runway which she narrated. The exhibition at the Lightroom near Kings Cross Station is open until 26 April 2025. Tickets can be booked here.

Here are new interviews with Cate ahead of the release of Guy Maddin, Evan Johnson and Galen Johnson’s RUMOURS in the UK and Ireland this Friday, 6 December. On same day, the film will screen out of competition in Cineteca Milano Arlecchino as part of Noir in Festival in Milan. More info here.

Vogue: Inventing the Runway Premiere

Nothing has ranged over 100 years of fashion quite like Vogue: Inventing the Runway, though, which traces the history of the catwalk from Charles Frederick Worth’s haute couture ateliers through to the livestream age. Theatre doyen and Lightroom founder Nicholas Hytner addressed the crowd assembled for the premiere of Inventing the Runway in King’s Cross on Thursday night, flanked by Anna Wintour, Mark Guiducci, Chioma Nnadi, and Cate Blanchett, who narrates the 50-minute exhibition. “A year or so ago, Anna and Mark came to see our David Hockney show before it had opened to the public, and as a result of that this collaboration happened,” he said. “It’s been an exciting and very creative experience for us to join with them in exploring a world that we knew very little about.”

Rumours Interviews

To prepare for the part of German chancellor Hilda Ort­mann in this month’s surreal ­horror-comedy Rumours – in which seven world leaders find themselves lost in the Bavarian woods – she pored over hours of news footage from G7 summits past.

“The theatre of it is so compelling, so entertaining,” Blanchett tells me. “You realise that, as pre-digested and elliptical as the politicians’ word salad is, their body language is so stilted: it’s disconnected from anything resembling a human being. There are all these received gestures that won’t offend people. It’s like the way a waiter points at the food on a menu in a Michelin-starred restaurant, always using the pinky finger. To me, they look coached.”

When Rumours premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, viewers were quick to suggest that, with her frosted hair, frumpy pink blazer and Teutonic air of authority, Blanchett was playing a thinly fictionalised version of Angela Merkel. This, says the 55-year-old Australian, is “absolutely not” the case, though it makes sense that people might jump to that conclusion since “there are so few examples of female leaders, and here you are as chancellor of Germany…”. In fact, she clarifies, the filmmakers “were very studious to avoid any parallels with real leaders, past or present”.

Rumours offers no explanation of the unspecified global “crisis” its G7 leaders are tackling – which they do by issuing platitudinous statements about “supply-chain management” and “the private sector”. To view the film as a critique of current affairs would be misguided.

“Everything was deliberately elusive,” explains Maddin, an affable 68-year-old Canadian whose previous, idiosyncratic films, including My Winnipeg (2007) and The ­Forbidden Room (2015), have brought him cult status in the world of cinema. “We wanted to make the movie timelessly timely, so it’ll always be relevant.”

During production, there were, she says now, as she sits poised beside Maddin in a London hotel room, “quite a few moments when we were all looking at one another, going, ‘Do you know what’s going on?’ Nothing ties together – and it’s delicious for that.”

“They’re just human beings,” as Maddin puts it. “Klutzes or nar­cissists who have found themselves in positions of great, real or symbolic power.”

“But narcissists are cultivated,” chimes in Blanchett. “It’s not something you’re necessarily born with.” And it hardly helps matters, she adds, that “the systems politicians are labouring under are so absurd and infantilising”.

Hollywood stars can also find themselves infantilised by their entourages, as Blanchett, whose CV includes the mega-budget Lord of the Rings franchise, knows only too well. “I realised early there’s a lot of attendant jobs that hang off my job, and you’ve got to be really cautious,” she says. “I’ve turned up at a photo shoot or on set and they’ve said, ‘We have the brand of dried fruit you like.’ ‘I do?’ I must have said somewhere I liked it and they have the idea I won’t come out of my tent without it.”

If the Melbourne-born Blanchett – whose mother was a teacher and father worked in advertising, until his death when she was only 10 years old – sounds bemused by such cosseting it’s perhaps because she is actually, as she describes herself, a “very practical creature”. While filming Rumours in Hungary, she says – shooting a pointed, teasing look in the direction of the distinctly rumpled-looking Maddin – “I ended up ironing his clothes.” And then there was the time during the 2020 Covid lockdown when she had an accident with a chainsaw, which left her with a “nick to the head”, at the home in East Sussex that she shares with her husband of 27 years, the Australian playwright and screenwriter Andrew Upton, and their four children, now aged between 22 and nine.

Not everyone perceives Blanchett’s down-to-earthness. At Cannes, she provoked a social-media backlash by describing ­herself – in reference to her work with the United Nations High ­Commission for Refugees – as “white, ­privileged and ­middle class”. The idea that one of the world’s highest-paid actresses could see herself as middle class left many online fuming. When I ask about this now, she responds with a disdainful moue, “Oh, did they?”

“You were using the standard British definition of middle class,” Maddin interjects hastily. “You’re above the poverty line and below plutocrat.”

“And maybe middle class is about outlook,” Blanchett concedes, defrosting slightly. “But, anyway, I’m sorry if I offended anyone.”

Amuka-Bird admits that Blanchett’s participation in the film – on which she also serves as an executive producer – spurred her to sign up despite the rather grim-­sounding prospect of submitting to three weeks of night shoots in rural Hungary. Maddin, who lives in decidedly unstarry Winnipeg, netted his A-list star via an unlikely connection in the form of Ron and Russell Mael, aka the US-born pop duo Sparks, in whose video The Girl Is Crying in Her Latte Blanchett performed last year (she also unexpectedly appeared dancing on stage during Sparks’ set at the Glastonbury Festival in 2023).

“I’m good friends with them, so maybe the fact Cate knew who I was helped, because I have this weird fame,” says Maddin. “I’m well known in very strange, mouldy ­little nooks and crannies of the industry, and then wide stretches have never heard of me.”

“But you’ve worked with some of the coolest people on the planet!” Blanchett exclaims, citing his collaboration with Isabella Rossellini on several films, including 2003’s The Saddest Music in the World, in which Maddin put the Italian actress in a pair of glass legs filled with beer – “I loved that!” – and his touring silent film Brand Upon the Brain!, for which Lou Reed occasionally provided live narration.

With such a hefty – and prestigious – body of work behind her, Blanchett is well into the phase of her career where she can give free rein to her creative instincts without damaging either her ­reputation or her bank balance. She has ­admitted that her decision to star in the recent flop video-game adap­tation Borderlands was the result of “a little Covid madness”, adding that she likes to do “crazy things”. She’s also said that “it’s the process not the outcome” that now attracts her to a project. Was this the case with Rumours?

“Not to be self-indulgent, but yes, particularly at the moment. Making a film, you’ve always been a little bit disconnected from the audience, but in the past you felt that if you made something halfway decent or interesting, it would eventually find that audience. So whether you’re on 70 screens or 7,000 or 700 million, you can at least speak to people.”

“Now, I just don’t know whether that audience will ever find something you make, because streaming services never give you the figures,” she says, a possible reference to Disclaimer, a recent series for Apple TV+, directed by Alfonso Cuarón on a vast budget, in which she served as both star and executive producer. “A lot of these [streaming] organisations are so concerned about money and shareholder returns, they think your only interest in the figures is to somehow take some money from them. And it’s, like, no, I actually want to know: how many people has it connected with?”

It’s no wonder, then, that Blanchett’s favourite medium remains theatre – where she began her career as a graduate of ­Sydney’s National Institute of Dramatic Art. ­Earlier this month, it was announced that she had joined the board of London’s National Theatre as a trustee. “What I’ve always loved about t­heatre is that it’s like one long sleepover; I have that feeling I had as a child that the adults have left the room. That’s what filming Rumours felt like – it was weeks of night shoots, freezing, we’d all ­huddle in a tent round a heater and talk about a whole range of things.”

Blanchett’s stage constant is Chek­hov: she made her ­Broadway debut in 2017 in The Present, Upton’s adaptation of the Russian playwright’s Plat­onov. Next year, she’ll star in The Seagull, in London, playing Arkadina alongside Emma Corrin’s Nina. Chekhov is a master of the tragicomic tone his predecessor Gogol defined as “laughter through tears”, a note struck also by Rumours. “I think the only appropriate response to the world at the moment is to laugh and cry simultaneously,” says Blanchett.

Politics, she adds, has become a form of entertainment – which perhaps explains the lack of substance seen in many of our leaders. “We have a fast-breaking 24-hour news cycle, in which everything is given the same magnitude,” she says. “And that makes it very hard to know what will have a consequence and what won’t.”

Full interview on the scans below.

 

Somehow [Cate Blanchett] has also found the time for Guy Maddin’s Rumours, a raucous, phantasmagorical comedy about the G7 that is a lock for the maddest movie of the year.

Maddin has form for mad. The Canadian director has long experimented in form and content. He ages his footage. He works with archival material. Small wonder that Blanchett and her costar Denis Ménochet are in giddy form when I meet them in advance of the film’s Irish release.

“Obviously I knew Guy Maddin’s work,” Blanchett says. “The Forbidden Room had an eerie quality that I couldn’t shake for days. I think My Winnipeg is a seminal work because of how personal and melancholy and wistful and absurd it is. But it also speaks to the way Guy can make something that is so specific, almost like a piece of folk art. You’d think it would have no relevance to anybody else, but somehow it reaches out into the world.”

“Without Cate our movie would never have been made,” Ménochet says. “It’s a testament to how curious and brave and inventive she is as an artist.”

“That’s what I told him to say,” Blanchett jokes.

Things start to look ominous for the ruling class when the waiting staff – with a nod to The Exterminating Angel, Luis Buñuel’s surrealist classic – fail to refill their wine glasses during a dinner at a stately pile in rural Germany.

There follows a B-movie swerve as the recently discovered remains of a mummified bog body spawn an army of masturbating, Tollund Man-style zombies.

“Protesters?” an alarmed Germany cries as the panicked premiers run into the woods, where, predictably, they get hopelessly lost. It’s geopolitics pitched somewhere between Scooby-Doo and George Romero.

“It’s very difficult to pin down what Guy Maddin and the Johnson brothers do,” Blanchett says. “Their approach to genre and character and storytelling is so deliciously different to anything else out there. It looks like a B movie and then it looks cinematic. You think you are watching a zombie film, but then it could be a documentary on UN security. It’s funny and weird. But it also speaks to our genuine fears about the state of the world.”

Helen Mirren, another Oscar winner, once observed that the trick to drunk acting is to try to look sober. In Rumours the deadpan ensemble must rise above the collective buffoonery of their characters.

“They are stupid people for stupid times,” Blanchett says, laughing. “Maybe we were typecast! I’d seen The Green Fog, which the Johnson brothers had made with Guy. So I had a sense of what the tone and the visuals might be like. They’re always constructing and deconstructing the films that they make. And so they’re intensely emotional and personal but also often just deliberate and stupid. Which seemed an appropriate tone when you’re dealing with the G7 and political leadership.”

“It was a little bit like a long sleepover,” Blanchett adds. “I was expecting to make this film in Guy’s garage. But no. We spent a lot of time doing night shoots. There was no going back to your trailer. We just spent all our time together. After a couple of weeks we started moving like we were one strange organism.

“It was physical. Denis spent a lot of time in a wheelbarrow and then a lot of time on the ground in wet foliage. I think he had it the roughest. Maybe that’s appropriate for France. And then they end up being carried in a wheelbarrow by Canada. I think our Canadian director was very pleased with that metaphor.”

Watching the bumbling politicians on screen, one can’t help but ponder real-world antecedents. That’s especially true of Blanchett’s character, who seems awfully like a dim-witted version of Angela Merkel.

“I think there are still so few female leaders out there,” the actor says. “That’s why they face such scrutiny. There aren’t a lot of examples. You have Mary Robinson, of course. Most people think that I’ve based this on Angela Merkel – who was such an incredible leader when you think about it. She had to keep the entire European Union together.

“Other people think it’s a cross between Jacinda Ardern and Ursula von der Leyen. But, no, it wasn’t based on anyone in particular. I did think about female politicians and the scrutiny they come under. The way they dress gets assessed in a very particular way. I thought about that a lot, about the colours and shapes they choose, with Bina Daigeler, the costume designer.”

Amusingly, the film is named after, of all things, the 1977 album by Fleetwood Mac, a fraught recording powered along by drug use, musical and lyrical differences, and romantic break-ups, including Christine and John McVie’s divorce, Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks’s split, and Mick Fleetwood’s marital troubles.

“It took me a while,” Blanchett says. “It was my husband that said it must be named for the Fleetwood Mac album. And so I asked them and they said, ‘Well, yeah, we were kind of obsessed with that album, but we didn’t bother to tell anybody.’ They’re not interested in giving an audience too much information. I think that’s what makes their films great.”

“Guy sent me some footage of his dog and then the G7, in that order,” she says. “We watched a lot of these strange awkward B-rolls from the G7. You see them walking along. You see the hand gestures. You can tell they’ve been coached about which gestures are inclusive and which gestures are aggressive.”

“Even though they all come from different cultures and speak different languages, they all share this same awkward body language. If you’ve seen speeches from the G7, there’s a series of received gestures that really don’t resemble anything vaguely natural. They do photographic listening. It’s all performative.”

“That was a great starting place for me. As strange as this movie is, at times it’s like a documentary.”

When I met Blanchett amid the Oscar buzz before her win for Blue Jasmine, in 2014, she spoke about the blurred lines between tragedy and comedy, referencing her turn as Blanche DuBois, Tennessee Williams’s best-known boozy heroine, in Liv Ullmann’s Broadway revival of A Streetcar Named Desire.

“Ben Stiller came to see Streetcar in New York, and he was so surprised afterwards,” she said. “He said he had never realised how funny it is. And I said, ‘I know! It’s completely absurd!’ But I think even when you’re playing something like Hedda Gabler, when you’re on an immensely tragic arc, you have to find the ridiculous.”

With Rumours the reverse is true: it’s a journey into preposterousness to uncover uncomfortable truths. Writing in Upturn, her 2020 essay collection, Blanchett hoped that the pandemic had shone a light on social and political failings – “the catastrophic misdirection of the past 30 years of economic and social planning (the guiding non-principle being that there is no such thing as society). No, short of nostalgia and regret, Covid-19 has ravaged the whole idea of small government, and highlighted the importance of social and economic justice.”

“Rumours is not trying to be an important film with a message,” she says. “But it is like a confession of today’s reality, because we are in an absurd situation. I think one feels most mad in the present day when you try to make sense of what is happening in the world. It is completely bewildering the situations that we as a species have found ourselves in. That we have willingly put ourselves. Or that we have been put in by our leaders. I think if you try to make too much sense of this movie you will feel like you’re losing your mind. That’s just like real life.”

Full interview on Irish Times

Cate Blanchett has told the BBC she is “deeply concerned” about the impact of artificial intelligence (AI).

Speaking on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, the Australian actress said: “I’m looking at these robots and driverless cars and I don’t really know what that’s bringing anybody.”

Blanchett, 55, was promoting her new film Rumours – an apocalyptic comedy about a group of world leaders trapped in a forest.

“Our film looks like a sweet little documentary compared to what’s going on in the world,” she said.

Asked whether she was worried about the impact of AI on her job she said she was “less concerned” about that and more “about the impact it will have on the average person”.

“I’m worried about us as a species, it’s a much bigger problem.”

She added the threat of AI was “very real” as “you can totally replace anyone”.

“Forget whether they’re an actor or not, if you’ve recorded yourself for three or four seconds your voice can be replicated.”

The actress, who has won two Oscars for her roles in The Aviator and Blue Jasmine, said she thought AI advancements were “experimentation for its own sake”.

“When you look at it one way it’s creativity, but it’s also incredibly destructive, which of course is the other side of it.”

In Rumours, Blanchett plays the Chancellor of Germany who hosts a G7 summit for other world leaders.

She said the political characters were not based on real politicians and she “deliberately stepped away from that as that’s what an audience is going to bring to bear”.

The film’s director, Guy Maddin, added that he intentionally does not reveal the ideologies or allegories of the characters because “there’s an attempt when making sense of a movie for an audience to project on to it a message, a lesson, to find themselves in it”.

Maddin explained that he started creating the characters “from a point of sheer contempt”, but as the film progresses and more ludicrous things start to happen “you feel for them a little bit”.

“They’re not politicians for very long, the structures that make them world leaders evaporate incredibly quickly,” Blanchet told the BBC.

“What you witness is that they don’t know who they are and that’s part of the artificiality of the way they have very little to do with the real world.

“People talk about actors being infantilised and indulged, but there’s something about politicians being infantilised and indulged by the system.”

The full interview can be watched on Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg show on BBC iPlayer.