Cate Blanchett is Reborn (as Rock Royalty) in I’m Not There and The Golden Age
It’s an apt new title for the great Cate Blanchett, the Oscar-winning Australian actress, now portraying a young (and electrifying) Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There, while resurrecting her ferocious role as Queen Elizabeth I in Shekhar Kapur’s The Golden Age. Studied? Reserved? Impenetrable? Here, Hollywood’s lead enchantress, unplugged.
Administrator
October 01, 2007
By Steve Garbarino
Click here for the Cate Blanchett gallery!
“I don’t know that I would ever deign to say I share anything with Bob Dylan. I understand the sentiment behind what he has said. I’m a wallflower. Someone asks me to dance, I’ll dance because I love to dance. Wanna dance?” —Cate Blanchett, above.
“I cannot guarantee any clear and thoughtful answers,” Cate Blanchett writes me, referring to her responses from our face-to-face interview, a few days after we spent a morning and afternoon photographing her for this story and having dinner (she: wild salmon, spinach salad, water for lack of vodka) at West Hollywood’s French hideaway Little Door. “If only Sophocles could answer for me. Do you have his number?” she continues. I respond that I have Heidegger on speed dial, and she writes back, “Heidegger is fine by me.”
This back-and-forth lightens things some, as I have been literally terrified for weeks over the prospect of interviewing Blanchett, particularly after watching her excruciatingly commanding performance in the sequel to Elizabeth. She may have second thoughts about lopping Mary, Queen of Scots’s head off, but I’m still worried she’s going to eat me for dinner. Or we’ll just sit there, staring—me, a pawn in her game, the clinking of cutlery as deafening as a gong quartet. I’m almost hearing her say drolly, “Oh, really” to everything I say.
Photography by Warwick Saint, Styling by Elizabeth Sulcer
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