Like the rest of us, Cate Blanchett is freakin’ tired and thinking maybe it is time to just stop for a bit.
It started with an interview in February, when Blanchett told Julia Roberts she’d had “half a bottle of red” after a trying play rehearsal and was mulling over the idea of quitting her day job to tend some chickens while reading a dead Frenchman’s ode to cookies:
“Maybe it’s just time to stop,” she said, to which Roberts begged her not to talk crazy. “No, but it really is. I have to go onstage in my underwear yet again, and I’m thinking, ‘Why? Why don’t I just feed the chickens and read Proust?’”
This is obviously a dream of mine as well, so while I do sympathize, I also do not provide the world with the necessary service of being Cate Blanchett and speak on behalf of every carbon-based life-form when I demand that she never retire and also that she live forever.
Thankfully, Blanchett clarified her threat to quit acting at last night’s Where’d You Go Bernadette? premiere, telling Vulture that though she does think it might be time to hang it up, she always considers quitting after wrapping a project:
“Oh, yeah, every time,” she said. So what keeps her going? “It’s because really interesting people like Richard Linklater and Maria Semple say, ‘Do you want to work with me?’ And I say, ‘Of course I want to talk to you!’” Blanchett said. “To me, the role is secondary. It’s about who you’re in conversation with — and who wouldn’t want to be in conversation with these people? Plus it’s Billy [Crudup] again, who I worked with 20 years ago, and that was an absolute joy, to work with him again. But then it’s like, ‘Okay. Time to stop.’”
However, it could be that Blanchett would continue to delight us on stage and screen if someone could just get her a comfy pair of Naturalizers and a chair:
Before she walked away, she expressed similarly dark sentiments about her black stilettos. “What am I doing in these shoes?” she asked, laughing. “I have bunions!” She paused for a moment. “I’ll tell you what it is,” she said. “It’s vanity.”
The solution to this problem is simple: Let Cate Blanchett wear whatever shoes she likes and henceforth act while nestled in a La-Z-Boy as long as she agrees to never leave us.