Cate Blanchett's retiring from acting? I'll believe it when I see it

The Guardian

16-04-2025

Cate Blanchett is an actor's actor. Cate Blanchett is the type of actor whose characters – flinty, steely, sly, sophisticated – are hardly distinguishable from the person herself. She speaks with the jarringly refined accent of an alien trained only on stage melodramas. She does not laugh; she titters. She does not walk; she glides. She does not debase herself with the prosaic concerns of you or I.
This is why it is very hard to believe that she is 'giving up'. In an interview with the Radio Times on Monday, Blanchett suggested she was no longer an actor. 'My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it. I am serious about giving up acting,' she said. '[There are] a lot of things I want to do with my life.'
What might these 'things' even look like? Granted, the two-time Oscar winner has other projects on the boil: she is working extensively with the UN, she is running a very prolific production company, she is walking down brutalist corridors and opening her eyes very slowly for Giorgio Armani. That's not to mention her three films currently in development: as an actor in Jim Jarmusch's Father, Mother, Sister, Brother (due later this year); as both actor and producer in sci-fi comedy Alpha Gang and Ben Stiller's The Champions.
But what does a grand dame do with her downtime? Blanchett is not ordering a coffee; her piercing gaze would make a barista die instantly. Blanchett is not visiting the hairdresser; like Tilda Swinton, she simply wills her blondness into existence. She'd hardly be the first performer to exaggerate their commitment to retirement. Maybe she'll pull a Daniel Day-Lewis, who exited the industry after Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread in 2017 – only to return for an upcoming film directed by his son. None of Blanchett's children have entered the film biz thus far – though her eldest son was purportedly '[performing] his own version of Hamlet' at age nine, which would sound like an uppity fiction for anyone except a child of Blanchett's. Ophelia calls.
Or maybe Blanchett could take inspiration from her recent colleague Steven Soderbergh, who directed her in this year's spy caper Black Bag. 'For the foreseeable future, the movie door is closed,' Soderbergh averred in 2013 – before proceeding to make 11 films in a decade. Lying! Isn't it the best?
We could also peer outside Hollywood entirely – to the equally lawless plains of pop music. Look at Elton, who began his Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour in 2018 – and ended it in 2023 after making $939m from 330 shows, the third highest-grossing tour of all time. Or Cher – who embarked on a similarly tortuous farewell tour from 2002 to 2005, only to return with the aptly named extravaganza Here We Go Again from 2018 to 2020. Retirement, these days, is incredibly lucrative. When Blanchett launches a Vegas residency playing her character in Blue Jasmine, consider me front and centre.
Then again, not all retirements have been fake-outs. Despite no official statement, Rihanna hasn't released an album since 2016 – though Fenty Beauty has made her a billionaire in the intervening years. Is Blanche by Blanchett on the horizon? When Blanchett launches her cosmetics line, you can say you read it here first. Finally, representation for people with perfect complexions and flaxen tresses.