Cate Blanchett admits she’s ‘always trying to get out of acting’

Cate Blanchett is “always trying to get out of acting”.

The double Oscar-winner, 54, who was nominated for at the 2022 Academy Awards for playing an obsessive conductor in ‘Tár’, is back on the big screen in ‘The New Boy’, but said she also loved producing the film.

She said at her Kering Women in Motion talk at the Cannes Film Festival: “I’m always trying to get out of acting. I’ve been trying to stop acting my entire professional life.”

Cate was in conversation with her producing partner, Coco Francini, and added their recent producing work behind the lens felt like “an extension, for me, of my work as an actor”.

Cate plays temperamental alcoholic nun Sister Eileen in director Warwick Thornton’s drama set in a remote outback Catholic orphanage in 1940s wartime Australia.

She added at Cannes about how she was once advised to stop taking small roles as she wanted to avoid doing lead parts: “I remember an Australian film director saying to me really early on in my career that I had to stop taking small roles.

“And I said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘That was the most interesting role.’ I didn’t want to play the lead. I want that one.”

“It’s about the conversation. And sometimes that conversation involves me being in front of the lens, and sometimes it’s back behind being a little bit too bossy sometimes from behind.

“The facilitation is equally as creative… I’m as interested in the development process as I am in the process of shooting it, and then I’m really interested in the post process right through to distribution and marketing.”

Cate told the February issue of Vanity Fair magazine she constantly thinks about quitting acting as she falls “in and out of love with it”.

She added: “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.”