The New Boy star Cate Blanchett reveals ‘worst thing’ about being an actor in Australia

Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett has revealed the one thing she dreads as an Aussie actor and what she is constantly fighting to change.

Cate Blanchett and Warwick Thornton attend a Q & A screening of "The New Boy" at the Astor Theatre on July 01, 2023 in Melbourne, Australia. Picture: Sam Tabone/Getty Images for Roadshow Films

If there’s one thing that Cate Blanchett dreads when she comes back to Australia, it’s being asked what she does by a taxi driver.

The two-time Oscar-winning A-lister is currently based in the UK but has returned to her homeland to promote The New Boy, her new drama with acclaimed Indigenous director Warwick Thornton.

Sitting in the Roslyn Packer Theatre at the Sydney Theatre Company, which she ran from 2008 to 2011 with her husband Andrew Upton, she said that living overseas in the US and the UK has given her perspective to see how much creative Australian talent is celebrated internationally, and how ignored it can be at homeland.

Cate Blanchett and Warwick Thornton are promoting their new film The New Boy. Picture: Damian Shaw

“The worst thing for us as an actor in Australia is getting in the back of the cab and a cabbie asking ‘what do you do?’ Because you think, ‘Oh, God …’,” she said. “You’re constantly having to fight for the space or to justify the fact that you have the right to actually be an artist in Australia.

“But yet overseas, our culture is celebrated and sung and praised but we don’t often do it internally. We don’t often know what we have here. And living and working overseas, I can see absolutely objectively what we have here.”

Cate Blanchett in The New Boy. Picture: Ben King

Blanchett said helping to promote homegrown stories such as The New Boy, about an Indigenous youth with supernatural powers who is taken in by a Catholic mission in World War II era outback Australia, is a top priority for her. She not only plays a nun in the South Australia shot film, but also co-produced the film through her company Dirty Films. Blanchett, Thornton and co-stars Deborah Mailman, Wayne Blair and 11-year-old newcomer Aswan Reid took the spiritual drama to the Cannes Film Festival in May, where it received a standing ovation.

“Any chance I have to amplify that and to find ways for that work to get out overseas and be celebrated, but also to be celebrated here, is deeply important to me,” Blanchett said.

Blanchett is visiting Australia hot on the heels of her appearance at the Glastonbury Festival last month, dancing to the Sparks song The Girl Is Crying In Her Latte. Blanchett had previously appeared in the video for the veteran American pop duo’s song, but her impromptu performance in front of tens of thousands of delirious punters the set the internet alight.

“Oh, did it?,” she said with a laugh. “Well, that’s exciting. I love Glastonbury. I’d known Sparks for a while now and I was in video and they were going to Glastonbury and I was going Glastonbury so they said, ‘would I?’. And I went ‘Why not?’. Everything was made up. Everything was on the fly.”

Originally published as The New Boy star Cate Blanchett reveals ‘worst thing’ about being an actor in Australia