Seriously Sexy

From: Esquire, 2003-08-01
Date added: 2003-09-06

Cate Blanchett may have the glamour of and old-fashioned movie star, but she also has and old-fashioned dedication to her profession which has seen her choose some decidedly unglamorous roles. Her latest, a gripping portrayal of Veronica Guerin, the investigative journalist murdered by Dublin's drug lords, is no exception. We meet our favourite adopted Australian and find out about her dedication to the truth and pointy ears.

At first, she is flustered, full of nervous energy; she has had to rush to get to our meeting in a London hotel suite and she's a little late. She apologises: she's flying to Santa Fe for her next film (The Missing, to be directed by Ron Howard and co-starring Tommy Lee Jones- a western, as denoted by Blanchett with the aid of a horse-riding mime). She still has loads of packing to do, and then her one-year old son, Dachiell, took his first steps this morning. She may be late, but she has certainly made an effort. She's all dressed up in black skirts, heels, fishnet tights and a black brocade jacket by Armani, with just enough make-up to suggest she's come to work. Seeing her for the first time, the word that comes to ming is 'striking': she is somehow both delicate and substantial - not so much physically (though the heels boast her 5"8'); it's more that there's something formidable in her direct gaze.

Her language is equally strong, at least to start with. The "shits" and "fucks" flow freely and, for some reason, it comes as a shock each time her lightly accented Australian English turns Anglo-Saxon. Then, when her caffe latte arrives, she is sweetly graceful. "Wow! That's amazing!" exclaims the 34-year old at the full glass-and-saucer service, and launches straight into a story about Dash amd his fondness for mil-only "babycinos". The smart clothes now look like a costume,an impression only strengthened when she starts to weave the spoon absent-mindedly between the gaps in her fishnets (something she keeps up throughout the interview until finally she snaps a thread). Cate Blanchett claims not to be an extrovert, but she is certainly a communicator. Once she is installed on the sofa, spoon weaving away, the stories and opinions start to pour out. In the course of out meeting we cover topics including politics (she is no fan of Australian Prime Minister John Howard - and "that's putting it politely"), the joys and anxieties of motherhood, and her ears ("They stick out a lot and tend to catch the wind. I loved skiing as a teenager but I had to stop because my ears got so cold"). Mostly, though, we talk about acting and films - she's "a big lover of the Swedes" - and, in particular, her latest project, Joel Schumacher's extraordinary bew film in which she takes the title role of murdered Irish jounalist Veronice Guerin.

Were you a better man, you probably wouldn't have put money on Joel Schumacher, director of St Elmo's Fire, Falling Down and Batman Forever, making a biopic of Veronica Guerin - even if you had, as Cate Blanchett urges you to do, seen his 2000 Vietnam movie, Tigerland. A reporter for Dublin's Sunday Independant, Guerin was a controversial investigative journalist who wrote about the cities drug lords when no one else would. As a result, the lives of her and her family were threatened several times, she was severely beaten, shot in the leg by a masked gunman at her home, and finally shot dead in her car on 26 June 1996. If you had just received a big payou on outisder Joel Schumacher in the Veronice Guerin biopics stakes, you certainly wouldn't then go and throw it all away on the chance of the producer being the man who made Pearl Harbor and Armageddon. But it was indeed Jerry Bruckheimer, king of the big-budget, all-action, two-boxes-of-popcorn blockbuster, who was the driving force behind this film - it was his inspiration and his idea to hire Schumacher.

Reassuringly, Bruckheimer explains his involvement in typically lofty Hollywood fashion: "I like to tell stories about individuals who make a difference in the world and are role models for furture generations," he announces. Schumacher, however, plays down any moral intentions. "My job is a storyteller," he says in a later conversation with Esquire ,"and I thought this was a ery interesting story. Having been a drug addict on the streets earlier on in my life, I have my own opinion about drugs and what they do to cultures, but I wasn't on a personal soapbox at all." The director does, however, bring up statistics of journalists killed "just because they dared to print te truth" (205 since Guerin's death in 1996), and the fact that, remarkably, Guerin's murder led to the passing of laws in both the UK and Ireland the assets of convicted criminals can be seized.

Blanchett was Bruckheimer and Schumacher's first choice for the role, and she embraced the spirit of the enterprise wholeheartedly. She had heard of Guerin, she says, but knew little about her. After conducting some thorough research, she was surprised by what she found. "I was astonished," she says. "There was no murder squad at the time that this was going on, so all this walking into pubs and knocking people off, nothing was being done about it. And the drug squad had been reduced to about 30 men...I think that was part of her frustration: there was absolutely no coordinated aproach and no funding for it. It was just this...bimbling thing."

And, however Hollywood its pedigree, Veronica Guerin is no U-571 or Saving Private Ryan: it makes no compromises whatsoever where the truth is concerned. Schumacher recreated Guerin's murder exactly as it happened; where possible, police records were used and, although only one man is currently in jail on charges directly related to Veronice Guerin's murder, names are definately, defiantly named. The odd companions made what Schumacher calls "a formidable trio" in pursuit of the truth. "I've driven the legal teams insane," he says, giggling gleefully at the idea. "I don't know how I got away with it. cate was great, she was not going to stand down either. Anyway, the hell with them - they're scum. Also, I'm going to do a story about someone who was bold enough to die facing these people and I'm going to cave? Some pampered little Hollywood pimp? Fuck 'em all!

Ask Cate about her days at Melbourne's Methodist Ladies' College and the first thing she thinks of is sex: "Men's last chance, we called it," she smirks. The next is religion: "Methodists, guitars...The minister was always up there sweating and playing the guitar." She briefly tried her hand at godliness at the age of 10 when her father died. "I tried to go to church every Sunday but it didn't last. I think it was just a child trying to add some meaning." (She is reticent on the subject of her father; in the past, she has dismissed the subject, saying, "Oh look, it's a long time ago. I feel worse fot my mother than I do for me.")

Acting has more of a lasting hold. By the time she left MLC, Blanchett held the grand title of Drama Captain, and her next move was to the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney. From there she went into the theatre, where the work came thck and fast, followed almost immediately by acclaim and awards. For a time, the stage kept Cate's self-confesse restless nature satisfied - in one year alone she played in The Tempest, Hamlet and an Australian play called The Blind Giant Is Dancing. But she was soon doing TV and well and eventually, at the age of 27, cinema, with two Australian films, 1996's Parklands and Bruce Beresford's Paradise Road the following year. The came Oscar and Lucinda. Based on the novel by Peter Carey and co-starring Ralph Fiennes, this should have been spectacular but was instead an oddly flat experience - it turned out to be one of those books that should stay on the page. Blanchett had to wait until the following year for the film that would be her crowning moment (so far, at least): Elizabeth. Though only her fifth cinematic role, her 1998 portrayal of England's virgin queen won her a Golden Globe, a BAFTA, an Oscar nomination and worldwide fame. It was all fully deserved, but still came as a big surprise. "It was just some obscure film," says Cate. "I remember telling John Cusack on my next film, Pushing Tin: 'I've just made this film and I've only made three films in my life and I'm never going to work again after this on comes out - and I mean really.' Then all of a sudden this thing happened and I said 'What?'"

After Elizabeth, most of the roles the name her way were, she says, "a case of 'change the name and it's the same part'." So she went instead for ensemble movies and supporting roles, even taking parts that were little more than cameos. "I thought, 'I just want to keep working.' It's the journeyman quality to it that I like. There's this sense that there's these certain things that one does that get you to point F, but it's a very cynical way to live your life."

In fact, of the 11 films she's made between Elizabeth and Veronice Guerin, less than half have been in leading roles. What with the sound but unglamorous part of virtuous wife Lady Chultern in Oscar Wilde comedy An Ideal Husband, her unrecognisable turn as American heiress Meredith Logue in The Talented Mr Ripley, her roles as the trailer-trash wife of John Cusack in Pushing Yin and the Canadian nymphomaniac wife of kevin Spacey in The Shipping News, it's clear Blanchett has never had "Maintain Career Profile" at the top of her must-do list. It's an old-fashioned attitude to her profession, and one perhaps better suited to te theatre, where her desire to lost herself in the part and almost unnerving capacity for disguise might be more easily accomodated. Talking to her, you notice that she looks like a different person depending on which angle or facial characteristics you're focusing on at the time. It's the same with her performances. It's quite possible to have seen her in a film and not know it was her.

In an industry where playing yourself - or rather, establishing the brand - is the usual route to stardowm, her ability to transform herself into a character should have been disastrous. But her performances have ensure that the awards and nominations have kept coming - even when the films in which she did take the lead haven't always set the box office alight. Apart from Oscar and Lucinda, dissapointments have included The Gift, in which she played a Southern American psychic, Charlotte Gray, where she was a Second World War resistance fighter in France, and the unfairly ignored Bandits, the comedy caper in which she starred alongside Billy Bob Thornton and Bruce Willis. "Well, I think Bandits was released on 13 September 2001," she comments, deadpan. "But this is the thing: you can never tell - you can only go in hopeful. When you're involved in something, you can't see the outcome, you simply get a feeling from it. Like with The Shipping News: I was in France doing Charlotte Gray and I'd met [director] Lasse Hallström ages ago, and I'd seen his film My Life As A Dog ages ago and thought,'This man's brilliant.' He said, 'Look, it'll be a week's work,' and she was the character I found most interesting. I thought,'Ooh, I haven't done that before, but I can do that...'"

It was for similar reasons that she chose to play Galadriel the elf queen in The Lord Of The Rings (Screen time in the first movie: approximately five minutes - about the same as in The Shipping News), even though her agent told her she was mad to commit a year ahead to do three weeks' work, and her appearance was so short that the man in her local chemist said he felt sorry for her. "Andrew, my husband, asked me,'Are you going to get to wear pointy ears?' And I said,'Yes.' And he said,'Do it.'" (And anyway, she points out, since those five minutes were shown, her public recognision has soared.)

And it's also presumably why, just a couple of weeks before we meet, she did two days with Jim Jarmusch on a short film - "Like Coffe and Cigarettes, which he did years ago with Iggy Pop and Tom Waits" - and clearly had the time of her life: "Jim is hilarious, and you just think,'Great, this is great.' We were still there at three o'clock in the morning and you think,'This is really good.'" Veronica Guerin was a rather longer-term project. Both actor and director spent many hours talking to Guerin's family, friends and colleagues. With Guerin, you don't have to dig deep before you hit controversy, and Blanchett expertly captures the commitment and passion of a driven journalist. "I think she had a real rage in her belly," she agrees, "she was someone who took action. And as much as she wore those sexy little short skirts, she was a bulldog. She was gamey."

but being "gamey" attracts attention, and with it criticism. "Veronica had this capacity to move in all kinds of circles," explains Joel Schumacher. "She could be with teenage drug users or Members of Parliament and everyone in between. She would adjust herself, as all brilliant reporters do, so she could get her story with every person. I know she had her detractors who called her reckless, but I think that's very sexist - I don't think you would call a male journalist who covers a was reckless; I think you'd say he was doing his job. I don't think infiltrating the drug lords in Dublin was reckless, I think it was pretty amazing." Blanchett agrees - particularly about the accusations of sexism. Asked how she feels about Guerin's decision to continue her work when her child had been threatened, she answers: "That's the eternal question.

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