Cate Blanchett talks to Katie Berrington for latest digital issue of Porter Magazine, later this month she will be seen on stage as Arkadina in Barbican’s production of The Seagull directed by Thomas Ostermeier, and in March on the big screen as a spy, Kathryn St. Jean, in Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag.

The professions that Cate Blanchett has portrayed on screen in the past few years include a maestro conductor, a prominent documentary journalist, a talk-show host, and now a top intelligence agent. “I’m a jack of all trades and, I think, master of absolutely nothing!” she quips. “You spend your life dipping in and out of all of these character circumstances and skill sets, and then they dribble away as soon as you finish the job.”

It’s a modest way to refer to herself, a two-time Oscar winner (not to mention her four Golden Globes and Baftas), producer and humanitarian, who is widely regarded as one of the greats of our time across stage and screen. But Blanchett is quite unassuming. She arrives 20 minutes early to meet at London’s Marylebone Hotel on a day off from theater rehearsals, hair pulled back, wearing black leather pants and an enveloping turtleneck sweater – although her large pink sunglasses do suggest the star sizzle beneath. She’s trying to track down a phone charger so that she can download a train ticket.

“My husband and I were going to get analogue, old-fashioned brick phones. And I’ve yet to do it,” she tells me, over a double espresso. “I’ve got to uncouple my life from three email addresses and two telephone numbers… But then so much falls through the cracks. I’d be a terrible spy. I can’t remember anything! I can’t hold anything up here unfortunately,” she says, tapping a finger on her temple.

She plays a spy with enigmatic aplomb, however, in Steven Soderbergh’s enthralling new movie, Black Bag, in which she and Michael Fassbender lead as a married couple, both legendary intelligence agents who embark on a cat-and-mouse game with national security – and with their marriage at stake. The supporting cast is also stellar: Pierce Brosnan, Marisa Abela, Naomie Harris, Tom Burke and Regé-Jean Page.

“It’s a spy thriller, but at the heart of it is this marriage,” she says. “They work in this profession where, by telling each other the whole truth, they can actually jeopardize the security of the person they love the most. Which is a beautiful metaphor for a marriage, where you agree to not know what you know. You have to trust. And that’s of course the hardest thing to do.”

Blanchett and Fassbender embraced this sense of secrecy when developing the relationship. “In a way, we decided to not know what we weren’t told. It was clear that they have a really physical relationship and a very deep connection. And they would literally die for each other. Which is, you know, a pretty good basis for a marriage,” she smiles.

In her real life, Blanchett is well-versed in working alongside her husband – she and the director and writer Andrew Upton have collaborated throughout their near three-decade relationship, including running Sydney Theatre Company for several years. “We made this agreement that when I was in the rehearsal room, he would be the artistic director; and when he was in the rehearsal room, I would be the artistic director. So you were freed up to be present in the room with a healthy lack of consequence.”

Despite the crossover in their careers, she feels that her work and home life – in England’s East Sussex countryside – are wholly distinct. “The demands of my life away from working are deep and present and very fulfilling – and sometimes there’s some intersection – but, when I step off, I’m in a completely different reality.”

It helps, she says, that her children – three sons in their late teens and early twenties and a younger daughter – “couldn’t care less about what I’ve done during the day. And nor should they. In the same way [that] I’m not into GPS-locating my kids and nanny-camming my way into their lives. But we’re very close,” she adds.

Black Bag is, as she describes it, “wonderfully stylish”. Blanchett worked with costume designer Ellen Mirojnick to curate her character’s agent attire: leather jackets, trench coats and sumptuous knits. In her everyday life, she loves to revisit old favorites from her closet and will often repeat a look on a red carpet (case in point: her recent Golden Globes gown, first worn in Cannes last year). Years ago, a friend insisted on color-coding her entire wardrobe – to fix its “organized chaos”.

“And then I started to re-wear things I hadn’t worn for a long time; things that I inherited from my mother and my grandmother,” she says. The color-coded system helps her to get dressed, particularly “on days when you’re preoccupied or you haven’t slept or you still haven’t shed the dream or the nightmare. And you just think, ‘I’m going to go naked today. It would be easier, more truthful’,” she chuckles.

Blanchett has worked with Soderbergh before, on 2006’s neo-noir crime drama The Good German, and admires that his “modus operandi is to entertain, to give people an accessible experience that is intelligent.” Of her own eclectic taste in projects (which includes, she insists, “a lot of dumb stuff!”), she considers that, overall, there is the desire to “speak to as many different types of audiences as possible”.

As part of Dirty Films – the production company that she and Upton co-founded with film producer Coco Francini – she and Francini recently spearheaded Proof of Concept, a program that offers financial support, mentoring and platform opportunities to women, trans and non-binary filmmakers. “But then it’s about scaffolding. [It’s about] those things being seen and being heard,” she says of the bigger picture, “because a homogeneous industry is not a healthy industry. [It is] so beset with a lot of nefarious and tragic forces.”

“But don’t you think, no matter what industry you work in, it’s hard to know where to place one’s energy at the moment…? There’s so much that is bewildering and heartbreaking and enraging about the situation we find ourselves in.”

Despite the widespread conversations around meaningful change happening in her own industry, she’s aware that it has only edged towards progress. “Everyone talks about the #MeToo movement as if it’s well and truly over, and I think, well, it didn’t really ever take root, to be honest. People were seeking to dismantle and discredit those voices that were only just beginning to come out from under the floorboards into the light. I find it quite distressing the way that it hasn’t taken root.”

She’s inspired by the rising generation of actors and what they are bringing to the table – including her recent co-star Abela, and Emma Corrin, who she is working with on the upcoming production of The Seagull at the Barbican. “Their point of view on a scene will obviously be profoundly different to mine, or someone of my generation. I’m just amazed by not only their aliveness of their point of view, but also their technical reserves in ways that I couldn’t have even imagined having or possessing when I was their age.”

Blanchett began 2025 by breaking the ice at the base of the Arctic Circle with her family; she was delighted to discover her children were all keen to plunge into zero-degree waters over the new year. “We thought our boys weren’t going to want to come, but they all came, they all got in. It was a really amazing trip.”

A bracing dip is actually the way the Australian starts most mornings, surrendering to the cold climes of her adopted home of the UK. “It shocks you into the present,” she says – and it was a point of connection she discovered with Fassbender. “We’re two of the most boring people in the world when you get us talking about cold-water swimming!”

After the trip, she went straight into rehearsals for The Seagull, directed by Thomas Ostermeier – back at the Barbican, where she did Big and Small (Gross und Klein) in 2012. It’s her first theater foray in six years and, while she can’t say yet if a return to the stage feels like a homecoming (“I’ll tell you when it starts!”), it’s a place in which she finds huge fulfilment. “I feel very alive on stage. Somehow liberated.” As well as Emma Corrin, the cast includes Tom Burke – making it the second time in little over a year that he and Blanchett have worked together. He describes it as an “electric” experience: “Cate is like quicksilver on stage and off; she’s got something utterly wild surging through that singular poise.”

With a career as eminent as hers, I ask if there are any parts of the job that she still has to summon confidence or courage for? “Oh, it’s always first day of school. That hasn’t changed,” she says of starting something new. And experience can have its downsides.

“The wonderful thing when you’re starting out is that no one has any expectations of you. You haven’t left a breadcrumb trail of things that you’ve done before, there’s no narrative about you at all. And so you’re freer to become or be anything. For better or for worse, the more you do, you have to work a bit harder to break apart any preconceptions. But people will think what they think, and I suppose, over the years, you do develop a thicker skin – but you then have to make sure it doesn’t mean you can’t slash that.”

We’re coming to the end of our hour together and I’m conscious of the packed afternoon she has to make the most of her day off. I squeeze in a last question. How does she draw boundaries that allow her to balance all the demands? “Limits on interview time!” she shoots back with a laugh. “No, I have, I think, quite a fluid relationship with life. And I don’t want to become rigid,” she pauses and gives a self-effacing smile, “but then, only rigid people say that.”

Photography Sonia Szóstak, Styling Helen Broadfoot, Art direction Michael Kelly, Hair Nicola Clarke, Makeup Mary Greenwell, Nails Michelle Humphrey, Production Erin Shanahan, Robbie Bullough, Fashion assistant Megan Hunt, Set design Georgia Currell