Photographs and interview by GREG WILLIAMS
As told to JANE CROWTHER

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Cate Blanchett loves her chickens. Today, she is gently hypnotising one in her potting shed. She’s never done it before but is following instruction on the art by director and friend John Hillcoat. Cate is stroking her feathered friend and gently guiding its vision from its beak to her gloved finger as she sits on a doorstep dressed in muddy wellies, a black silk gown and leather gloves. The chicken relaxes as she soothes and is soon so chilled that she can carefully place the bird on its side, where it lays motionless. ‘I’ve fucking done it!’ Cate whispers in astonishment. 

It’s hardly surprising that Cate can achieve such a feat. She has been an incredible artist since I first met her on Elizabeth when we were both at the relative start of our careers in film. Since then, she has taken on historical royalty, real-life war reporters, narcissistic conductors, intergalactic baddies, Middle-earth elves, Old Hollywood stars and iconic folk musicians in her three-decade career, during which we’ve collaborated many times. A performer open to experience and hungry to explore, Cate is always creative – whether that’s being playful in Piazza Navona on set of The Talented Mr Ripley, jumping in a bath in LA to pretend to use the showerhead as a telephone, donning her face mask to execute a perfect silhouette (and make a statement) in Covid-times Venice, or agreeing to stand on a Roosevelt Hotel fire escape just before the Oscars where she was nominated for Tár to capture the best light – and losing an unimaginably expensive borrowed diamond earring in the process, which was recovered five flights down. My heart was in my mouth for the minutes it took to find it! Twenty-seven years on, we bumped into each other at Glastonbury, where Cate generously invited me to her chicken shed to shoot our cover.

After finishing shooting Black Bag with Steven Soderbergh, she is about to set sail to promote her latest role as a space renegade in game-turned-movie actioner Borderlands, as well as her autumn Apple+ TV series, Disclaimer. Directed by Alfonso Cuarón, it features her as a documentarian who finds the tables turned on her and will premiere at the Venice Film Festival. Then there’s Rumours, in which she plays a fictional German chancellor at a G7 meeting that goes weirdly awry in the woods. It’s a typically varied slate that shows Cate’s appetite for exploration, but right now she has found time to play in the vegetable  garden. She leads me into the rambling back yard – the chicken has shaken itself off and pottered away back home to the chicken coop labelled ‘Cluckingham Palace’ that it shares with six other chickens. Cate is hoping for baby chicks soon from two broody birds snuggled in their nests. 

Deep in the garden, in a tangle of trees and verdant plants, are a set of active hives that provide lavender-flavoured honey. ‘We’ve always wanted to have bees,’ Cate says as she swaps her silks for protective wear to inspect the apoid workers. ‘We’ve had bee bricks in the city, for orphan bees or solo bees. But the idea of having hives… I’ve become obsessed because about 20 years ago on the cover of Time magazine, there was genuine full-on panic about how pesticides were killing off the bee population, and the enormous knock-on effect of that. It was an exploration of how fragile bees are as an insect species, and as the major pollinators they are, how deeply we rely on them. It really activated me, environmentally – and engendered big-sky thinking. The change in the taste of the honey reflects the change of their environments. It’s fascinating.’

As she carefully peers inside the hive, she tells me how she lost a colony to hornets last year, so had to invest in paper imitation wasp nests to hang in the trees. I ask her if it’s hard to leave the garden when she has to go away to work for months at a time. ‘Don’t you think, when you’re away, it helps to have a “dreaming” place?’ she asks. ‘A point of physical connection?’ She considers the question as someone who travels extensively for work. ‘Is it hard to leave the weeds?’ she jokes. ‘Actually, can I say: weeding is deeply therapeutic. My grandmother, who lived with us, and helped raise us after my father died, was an avid gardener but hated weeding. So she hired a gardener. His name was Mr Crutchett and he used to sing these beautiful songs, and just sit on his rear end, all day, pulling weeds in our garden. I think he was serenading my gran who he had a crush on. And he was the happiest man I’ve ever met. You don’t have to make headway in the garden – I humble myself and say, you know, “One weed at a time”.’

We leave the woody dell and Cate is driving a tractor as we discuss our first meeting, on set of Elizabeth, a star-making role that gave her her first Oscar nomination. ‘If I knew it was going to be a big moment, I would have collapsed under the weight of the pressure,’ she recalls. ‘I kept saying Judi Dench, Flora Robson, Glenda Jackson – I mean, what can I possibly add to the conversation? And the fact it was Shekhar Kapur – a director from Bollywood, and I was from the Antipodes; from the colonies – only exacerbated my hubris. These two outliers were looking at Elizabethan history, which is a period where so much of the English dream time comes from. Who did I think I was? The chutzpah. I think the only way I coped was the fact that I thought: “This is both the beginning and the end of my career.” I honestly thought, “This is it, so I may as well enjoy it.”  I think that was the moment where I learned to flip terror and anxiety to excitement. They’re very similar energetic forces. People often ask “What would be the advice you’d give to your younger self?” I’m always really reticent to give people advice because mistakes are so important, and I’ve certainly made a lot of them.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘But honestly, as one gets older, the advice is think quicker. Do it quicker.’ Quicker? I ask. I imagined she’d say slower. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Live more slowly, think more quickly. Don’t overthink.’

Who did she look up to as inspirations back then as she tried to build her career in what she describes as a sort of ‘survival mode’? ‘I grew up in this incredible golden age of Australian cinema. We had Jack Thompson, Judy Davis, Mel Gibson, Bruce Beresford, Peter Weir, Gillian Armstrong and then Nicole Kidman went and forged a career, which was extraordinary, in America. But I was never that girl. So the fact that I even got the chance to make a film was miraculous. I never expected to leave the shores of home to play the Queen of England.’ It wasn’t the end of her career, obviously.

As she amassed more work in the likes of The Talented Mr Ripley, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Veronica Guerin and The Aviator, Cate admits : ‘You hone your instincts, and you learn to trust them. There are times when one doesn’t trust – I mean, the times when things have gone a bit cattywampus are the times when I’ve not trusted my instincts.’ Cattywampus? Does she really use that word? ‘You don’t use that word? Everything’s akimbo. All screwed up. Back to front. I am sure it’s in the dictionary.’ She laughs. ‘Surely Hollywood Authentic is cattywampus?!’

We walk to a nearby swing hanging from a tree and as she twists the rope and allows it to unfurl, she spins as we discuss inspiration. I have a preoccupation with ideas and the notion of where they come from, and I naturally want to hear Cate’s take on it. ‘It’s elusive and it never comes from the same source. If it came from the same place, creative flow would be easy, wouldn’t it?’ she says. ‘Inspiration, for me, arises from unexpected places. Sometimes it’s a snippet of conversation, a snatch of someone else’s conversation that you overhear, or sitting in cold water, or actually tuning in to the sounds immediately around you or the music of others… And I think probably a lot of the time it comes in that – and I hate this word because it’s so overused – liminal space between wakefulness and sleep. You know, that glorious moment just as you’re waking, and coming into consciousness. Hopefully it’s not in a gutter, it’s in your own bed!’

Inspiration also comes from being open to receiving, she says. ‘I’ve had experiences on stage where there’s energy coming from the audience, and from the other actors, and from the text – there’s something that just erupts out of this intersection, that none of you can name, and you don’t quite know how it came or what it means and it’s absolutely thrilling. I think it’s probably the feeling that people get when they bungee jump. You intellectually know the sequence of events, but, once you’re in the middle of it, it’s happening to you, and through you, and you just have to flow with it. I’m deeply uncool. I can’t surf, and I can’t play pool. But I imagine if you hit the ball in that spot, or you catch the wave, it’s similar to being on stage. You can rehearse and prepare for this but if you take flight it’s a collective experience that is about connecting to the present moment with radical openness. It’s not something you can ever plan your way into.’

The hoping for such lightning to strike must be something of a rollercoaster. Cate nods. ‘I think it’s why a lot of people who live creative lives develop a superstitious relationship to the work: “Well, this time, the muse won’t visit me. It won’t happen unless I do x, y and z to control the conditions.” For me, personally, it’s important to have a life in parallel that’s as rich as the work, and totally antithetical to the work. I’m not living my life to work. I try not to think about where ideas come from. You only think about where they come from when they’re not coming. And that’s why it’s always better to work with people who are far more interesting than you are, and more skilled than you are.’

Cate has collaborated with numerous skilled artists during her career – from Martin Scorsese, Anthony Minghella, Jim Jarmusch and Peter Jackson to Sally Potter, Gillian Armstrong, Wes Anderson and Todd Haynes. Does she ever look back at her work? ‘I think it’s challenging working in a very concrete medium where the object remains – fixed, static, finite. If you’re a plastic artist, or you work in film, there’s an object; a product that can be held, and it’s finite. But the experience is not finite. It slips through your fingers, and you have to let it go. So I don’t revisit those objects because it’s not useful. It’s like the memory of a moment or the memory of a song over time. The memory of anything can become more powerful than the thing itself.’

Those sorts of memories are produced nightly in the theatre, she says. ‘The audience warms this circle with you, and they produce, for that moment, this miniature zeitgeist – and then it’s gone. Increasingly I am drawn to those more ephemeral artforms that don’t leave a “product”, but they leave some sort of ephemeral residue between people.’

The characters and projects she inhabits leave their mark on her too – she admits that she doesn’t feel she ever leaves a character fully behind. ‘It’s like those conversations that are late-night, and protracted, and somewhere they lodge deep within you, in a way that you can’t necessarily consciously recall them. It’s like all the relationships or friendships or encounters, positive or negative, that you’ve had – they will come back to you in some way. They will keep returning to you. You view the world through the prism of the conversation – the creative conversation that you’re engaged with. So you’ll hear words. You’ll hear phrases. You’ll see gestures. You’ll hear music that all connects to the project. That leaves you. That obsessive thing leaves you. But the residue – the glorious unfolding residue – of it, never leaves you. I am eternally grateful for that.

‘It’s like reading a really, really terrific book,’ she explains. ‘You’re inside. You’re with the novelist. The author locking arms with you, going on a long walk. I don’t know about you, but when I get to the end of such a book, and I realise there’s only three pages to go, I have a bittersweet melancholy as every word, every phrase – you are inching closer to the end of something. But that story doesn’t ever leave you. But you try and recall the book – in all of its particulars, in all the order it happens… for me, it becomes a jumble. What seems so linear and clear when you’re in the middle of it creatively – you can put all the pieces together – it shatters and fragments. And if you try and put it back together, and replicate it, you know, to do the metaphorical sequel – it’s a disaster.’ She smiles. ‘You’ve got to say, “This is fragmentary, and I’ll remember it as I do, or not. Maybe I’ll forget…”’