After winning two Oscars and making films with some of Hollywood’s foremost auteurs, Cate Blanchett has already considered retirement from acting. “My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it: I am serious about giving up acting,” she recently told the Radio Times. “[There are] a lot of things I want to do with my life.”
The 55-year-old actor, who picked up Academy Awards for 2013’s Blue Jasmine and 2004’s The Aviator, said she has never outgrown the “feeling of being uncomfortable” with fame. “When you go on a talk show, or even here now, and then you see sound bites of things you’ve said, pulled out and italicized, they sound really loud,” Blanchett continued. “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.”
Over the course of her three-decade-plus career, Blanchett has earned eight Oscar nominations, working with filmmakers including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, David Fincher, Ron Howard, and Peter Jackson. “As you get older, acting just gets more and more humiliating,” Blanchett told Julia Roberts during a conversation for Interview magazine in 2019. “When I was younger, I would wonder why the older actors I admired kept talking about quitting. Now I realize it’s because they want to maintain a connection to the last shreds of their sanity.”
When Vanity Fair’s David Canfield asked about her apparent desire to quit acting during the 2023 awards campaign for Todd Field’s Tár, Blanchett said: “It’s not occasional—it’s continual. On a daily or weekly basis, for sure. It’s a love affair, isn’t it? So you do fall in and out of love with it, and you have to be seduced back into it.”
After production on Tár wrapped, Field suggested that Blanchett take a hiatus from acting. “I just said no to a couple of things. I think it’s time to be quiet,” she told VF at the time. But the Australian actor hasn’t slowed down much since then. Her recent credits include Alfonso Cuarón’s AppleTV+ series Disclaimer, Eli Roth’s Borderlands, and Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag. Blanchett is next set to star in Jim Jarmusch’s Father, Mother, Sister, Brother.
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