When Cate Blanchett was around 5, she wrote a miniessay—saved for years by her mother and unearthed serendipitously during a recent move—envisioning her possible future as an adult: “When I grow up, I would like to be a man. I would still love my family. But I could light a fire and go to work. And when I’m bored being a man, I think I’ll just be me.”
Blanchett tells this story over tea in Los Angeles, amused by the kid logic behind it. Yet all those half-fanciful, half-practical dreams have come true for her, at least figuratively. She has played a man—more than one, in fact—in movies like Julian Rosefeldt’s dazzling 2015 and (as Though she seems to take on projects without a lull, in conversation it’s evident that even when traveling—she lives with her family in England—her thoughts stay close to home. A teenage son who’s looking at universities, a husband, Andrew Upton, with whom she runs the production company Dirty Films: family is her inner orbit, maybe even the sturdy gravitational pull that makes her work possible. And if you think she can’t light a fire—well, just look at her.
