Cate Blanchett: The Golden Icon

Revered actress Cate Blanchett revisits the role that thrust her onto the international stage in 1998's Elizabeth. Now ten years, two kids, one Oscar, and innumerable critically lauded performances later, the Australian actress commands the screen again in Elizabeth: The Golden Age, also directed by Shekhar Kapur and costarring Academy Award–winner Geoffrey Rush, hunky leading man Clive Owen, and newcomer Abbie Cornish.

You've said that you were reluctant to take this role again. What changed your mind?
What convinced me was time really. Shekhar, the minute we finished the first one, was talking about my playing Elizabeth again, but hundreds of other ideas. And we've remained friends and talked about various projects, and Tim Bevan from Working Title said, "Look, just let us work a script up, and if doesn't work, it doesn't work." And I found the notion of the love triangle, the very structure of the narrative was quite different, because I've always said that if I did another one, Elizabeth shouldn't be the central character. And because the structure of the romance — because it's an unabashedly romantic film — I think was quite different, and it didn't feel quite like treading the same ground. So, yeah, time in the end and knowing that Geoffrey and Clive were on board. And that Remi [Adefarasin] was going to shoot it and working with Alexandra Byrne who did costumes, again, who was different, a genius I think.

Congratulations on the win in Venice as best actress for I'm Not There.
It was cool wasn't it? I was very surprised and pleased.

It seems that people are putting you in the mix for the Oscar again. You already won for playing Katharine Hepburn, and now you're playing another famous person, Bob Dylan, who happens to be a man. Is it daunting to play somebody real, or, in this case, with Elizabeth, somebody who is real and has been played by many people before?
There's a long and glorious legacy of actresses who played Elizabeth I — from Flora Robson and Bette Davis, Glenda Jackson, Helen Mirren, Anne-Marie Duff. She's constantly reinvented. One of my favorite plays is a [Friedrich] Schiller play: Maria Stuart (Mary Stuart), about a fictitious meeting between Mary, Queen of Scots, and Elizabeth I. She's right for reinvention because she's such an enigma. Also if you think about the Elizabethan age — when the English culture as we know it was really crystallized — it's a fascinating period of history, so I think there'll be many more Elizabeths, long after this film. Because I think she's a fantastic — particularly for a director like Shekhar — a point on which to leap off for a story.

And is protecting something iconic like Bob Dylan irresistible to you as an actress?
Well, Elizabeth I is iconic, as well. I think I run 100 miles an hour away from projects every single time and in the end, the ones that stick are the ones that sort of pursue you and you can't say no to. And the idea of playing Bob Dylan was just so utterly ludicrous — I mean, of course I had to say yes. And it was very daunting, and I was a bit nervous about returning to a character [like Elizabeth], I suppose, that allowed me to walk into a door to an international film career. You don't ever want to feel like you're going backwards. So once I perceived that I could actually progress forward through playing it, then it became exciting to me.

Could you talk about the first day in costume — getting back into her skin?
It was quite organic. Obviously, I started with Morag Ross, who did the hair and makeup, and Alex Byrne — we had long, long discussions about where to start. And, obviously, in the end, no matter how much research you do, you're telling the particular story that the script and the director prescribe. And I think the great thing about Shekhar and I working together is that I'm fascinated by history and he's utterly disinterested, so I think we temper one another really well. But, you know, we did a lot of research, but in the end you have to say: Well is she starting off at a point where we kind of left her at the last film, except she was at a point of utter rigidity in the end of the last film, so how does one exist within that rigid place? So you have to sort of open that up a little bit. But it felt strange — it was like there was an echo in the room, yet it felt very fresh. And I'd seen Shekhar and Abbie — because I don't think she'd seen the first one — we watched it just before we started to film. And I was incredibly uncomfortable with the notion of — I was thinking, Oh, god, it's 10 years later — have I aged that much? You know, being an actress in film is a bit like, you know, aging in dog years. But I was surprised at how well it stood up, and I thought, Well that's that, and it is its own thing, and I was excited by the fact that this film was at once an echo in that you've got the same sort of creative team, a few of the same characters that was its own creature. It's a much more internal film, I think. An interior film, despite the kind of epic backdrop. It was a bit like a homecoming. I think I was uncomfortable in a healthy, useful way.

Speaking of iconic characters and franchise, could you talk a little bit about your decision to climb onto Indiana Jones?
Literally, "climb onto." It's such a well-oiled — as you say — "iconic" franchise, one in which I grew up with. And on the first day of shooting it was extremely surreal. I was watching the monitor as Steven [Spielberg] set up the frame. And I knew the iconography of the frame — I knew the trucks, I knew the layout, I knew the way that these things were lit. And then I was meant to enter the frame — it was a real, like Zelig moment. But it's been fantastic and so much fun, and my boys have had an absolute ball.

Are they sworn to secrecy too?
Yeah. Absolutely.

One of the things that's so interesting about these performances as Elizabeth are the subtle changes in your face that convey all of her different moods —
You can say it: "Age." [laughs]

Not at all! What did you do to distinguish each little look she gives that lets us in on what's going on behind the scenes?
I think it's tricky but vital that as an actor working in film, you have a sense of the third eye in that you can be aware of what you're projecting but not in a self-conscious way. So, I think if you're internally engaged with the set of feelings and emotions and also the actions you're trying to play on the other actor — because it always has to be active — then that will externally take care of itself. I mean, I hope I wasn't mugging too much, but yeah — I didn't think about that on the day very much. Obviously when you're getting into hair and makeup, like I was suggesting before, it is a form of masking up, but even when you're in your Elizabethan war paint, you don't want that mask to be opaque, it has to be transparent. So hopefully there was a transparency to it.

This film takes license with the facts, as Schiller did in Mary Stuart —
That's what good drama does.

So, is this fictionalized history, historical fantasy, or the exploration of legend — how do you perceive it?
I think it's all three. In the end when you only have — I don't know quite how many minutes and seconds the film is — but when you have a couple of hours to tell an incredibly dense period of history, by the process of selection, you're automatically telescoping the events, and you're automatically saying, "This event has more significance than the one that's been omitted." So it's never going to be like reading the letters, or the court documents, or reading Alison Weir's biography of Elizabeth. It's not the same experience, but then going to see a film shouldn't be; you're being told a fable, and a fable through the eyes of that director, and it's very temporal, too, filming, so hopefully the film has a contemporary quality. I think like all good stories that they're able to connect to the current collective unconscious, what we're all thinking about, what it means to be female now as much as what it means to be female then.

Elizabeth and Raleigh seem to have an incredible romantic chemistry between them, yet they don't get together — the timing seems to be off.
Yeah, timing's everything, isn't it? What interested me about the relationship between Raleigh and Elizabeth in this particular incarnation of the set of events was that there was a vicariousness to it. And I think that happens in a lot of so-called love relationships, where you almost want to be the person as much as you want to possess the person. I think there were a lot of male courtiers that Elizabeth over the years had strong connections with, and I think that she was probably fascinated with the freedom that was afforded not only an adventurer like Raleigh, but also the men in the court who could travel a lot more freely than she could. I mean, she never left the shores of England.

Can you talk about Clive himself?
I think every woman who works with Clive has incredible romantic chemistry. [laughs]

Is he a professional charmer?
No, he's very frank and open and not at all self-conscious. I think that that's incredibly attractive — when somebody is as attractive as he is, but seemingly as unaware of it as he is.

When the queen says "I have a hurricane in me," we believe her. For you personally as an actress, what do you have in you that makes you believable to us?
Oh, god. I'm utterly the wrong person to answer that question — I have no idea. Hopefully a rich set of life experiences that I'm able to draw on, but at the same time, I'm not at all interested in playing myself or imposing my own value system onto a character. It's like having conversations continually with like-minded people: You get a very skewed perception of the way the world works. So I like having conversations with characters who think in very different ways to me, and have very different sets of experiences.

Elizabeth seems to have a very difficult time finding a mate and having to remain the Virgin Queen because of her position — what do you think is the most significant difference between women of her time and women now?
I was reading Joan Didion's book The Year of Magical Thinking again the other day, and she referred to various psychologists who were analyzing the notion of grief, and the grieving process, and saying that somewhere along the way in the last century, there became this notion that we all need to be happy, so nobody fully grieves anymore because we can't be seen to be unhappy. So the notion of happiness for someone in Elizabeth's position is sort of a strange one. I think it's a very modern concept that happiness is something that we not only have to strive for, but can achieve in this lifetime. I think Elizabeth's situation was entirely different. In relation to what you're saying about finding a companion, the reasons for getting married were then deeply unromantic. It had to do with securing a nation, and it was a political tool. Women were used as part of the political negotiation process between countries. And the fact that Elizabeth claimed that political mechanism for herself, and was able to use it herself, meant that the prospect of finding love for her was very elusive. The history books say — you know the history books were written by courtiers at the time — that the closest she came was the Duke of Anjou. But in Shekhar's first film, the Duke of Anjou is a raving transvestite — so everything's up for grabs in these films.

This question has to do with her sexuality: It seems like she almost teeters on madness when watching the courtship of Bess and Raleigh — how much did you play with that idea of her being somewhat demented?
I don't think I thought about it a lot, which the film — I did it in about three or four scenes, one of which was cut because it was talking about Mary Stuart, and I think they decided it was a bit too much discussion about Mary Stuart, so they cut it out. But I tried to see it through — and of course, this is not in it at all — her self-medicating with herbs and being physically unstable, because I thought that at the time that I'm playing her, she would've been quite menopausal. Pre-, you know, menopause. That she's going through "the change."

She was likely in her 40s?
I think, at the time, I kept telling Remi, who shot it, to take off the 12-denier stockings that he was shooting me through to show a few more wrinkles, but you know, Shekhar likes women to look beautiful, so — in terms of that madness, it was not only what was going on for her psychologically, but what was going on for her physically. That's great that you got a little texture of that, but I think that the whole complexity of what I was trying to do maybe wasn't in the film.

Do you think that if it weren't for Elizabeth that England would be speaking Spanish today?
Quite possibly. It's a really interesting thing to look at history, the history of failure. I mean, if we analyze history by the failures that took place rather than the victories, [they] have influenced us in incredibly — the way we've ended up where we are today. But, absolutely, it would've been a very different place.

Was there any discussion about a fictional scene — as in the Schiller play — between you as Elizabeth and Samantha Morton as Mary, Queen of Scots? I would've loved to — I think Samantha Morton's incredible. She's such a dangerous, exciting, unusual, unpredictable presence onscreen. I so admire her work. But maybe if anyone's going to ever do the Schiller, I'd be there with her absolutely.