Cate Blanchett on ‘Disclaimer’ Notes, ‘Squid Game’ Cameo

Cate Blanchett is no stranger to playing complicated, misunderstood women. But in Apple TV+’s “Disclaimer,” Alfonso Cuaron’s seven-part series about a documentarian whose deepest, darkest secrets come to light in a novel written by an unreliable narrator, the two-time Academy Award winner, and now three-time Emmy nominee, was tasked with embodying an embattled woman who loses control of her own story.

“The challenge for me, and I suppose the painful reality, was that when you play a central character in a narrative, you invite an audience not necessarily to have empathy with you, but you invite them into your character’s point of view,” Blanchett says from her home in London. “Disclaimer” was the “antithesis” of that conventional wisdom, forcing Blanchett to sit in others’ snap judgments of her character, Catherine Ravenscroft, until she finally reclaims her story in the harrowing finale.

“I, as an actor and as a character, was put inside a very small box that was slowly having the air squeezed out of it until I finally got to speak,” explains Blanchett. “Alfonso has impeccable judgment, but there was a conversation at one point where a certain scene wasn’t going to be in the final edit. And I said, ‘I think it’s really important that the people hear that perspective, because we’ve asked them to sit through Catherine’s silence. She has to say why she didn’t speak. Otherwise, we are robbing the audience of the full stop.’”

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Cuarón approached Blanchett about collaborating on an adaptation of Renée Knight’s 2015 novel, which he had read before making “Roma.” It would be expanded into seven episodes — or, as the filmmaker likes to put it, seven “chapters.” After signing on as the star and an executive producer, Blanchett became heavily involved in each step of the production. But, much like the audience, the actor found herself being confronted with her “own immediate judgments of characters’ motivations.”

“Alfonso was really engaged in the fact that there’s this war at the moment — and it does feel like a battle, actually — for a singular truth, which I think is a really dangerous and rather pointless exercise, because truth is such a complex thing,” Blanchett says. “We all know it’s made up of so many different perspectives, and the ones that we lean into are often the most pre-digested, pre-masticated ones that are really easy to swallow and somehow make us feel like we’re good people and the guardians of all knowledge and morality. We don’t like those truths that make us feel uncomfortable about ourselves.”

“Disclaimer” specifically forces viewers to confront their own biases and the cultural vilification of so-called “bad” women. “I think if you go back and watch it a second time, there’s a crude picture of Catherine that the people were assembling for themselves that didn’t have a lot to do with who she was or what she did, or the impact that she was having in the room,” says Blanchett.

The truth was hiding in plain sight. For the first six episodes, viewers were led to believe that Catherine, while vacationing in Italy years earlier, had initiated a self-absorbed affair with a 19-year-old stranger named Jonathan (Louis Partridge), who ultimately died after saving Catherine’s young son from drowning in the ocean.

In the finale, Catherine finally confronts Jonathan’s father, Stephen (Kevin Kline), whose late wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville), had written the novel based on a false perception of her son’s final days. But what really happened was that the night before his death, Jonathan had broken into Catherine’s hotel room, forced her to pose for nude photographs, and then violently sexually assaulted her.

“I think to know that you were moving through and unpicking an audience’s often intractable judgments of what had gone on was a profound relief,” says Blanchett, who recalls feeling markedly lighter after shooting that extended, 40-page monologue all in one take.

The devastating final twist was a secret that Blanchett fought to keep, even if it made press next to impossible. “There are many tangential conversations I would’ve loved to have had about what happens when you sit with abuse, and the various different ways that people bury this [trauma],” she says. “The courage that it takes still in this day and age to stand up and say it, even after you’ve been sitting on that shame, and the attendant shame that comes for people who are victims of abuse — I feel like it would’ve been great to use the series in a way as a launchpad to talk about that stuff. You can’t make that stuff happen, but I’ve had quite a few people stop me in the proverbial supermarket to talk about that.”

While she is most renowned for headlining films, Blanchett says she is “absolutely” looking to venture further into television. In 2020, she earned her first two Emmy nominations for FX’s “Mrs. America,” as both an actor and producer. Having always been actively involved in the development of a show, she is now “particularly keen” to join a series “that is fully formed.”

Blanchett may get her wish sooner rather than later. Last year, she filmed a top-secret cameo for the final scene of Netflix’s “Squid Game,” in which she played an unnamed American recruiter who the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) acknowledges and sees playing ddakji with a homeless man in a back alley. The offer “came out of the blue,” and Blanchett was given little context.

“Because it’s such a cult series and they were shooting in L.A. of all places, everyone was on a need-to-know basis,” she recalls. She didn’t even do a costume fitting; the production asked her to bring her own suit. “I got a couple of storyboards. I had to [learn to] play the game very quickly. I had to practice and practice. I knew there were four or five setups that they were going to do, and I knew what they needed from every shot, and then I was given the sides. But it was one of the more mysterious jobs.”

The surprise casting of a movie star of Blanchett’s caliber suggests that Netflix is exploring new ways to keep the IP alive. Does this mean she is open to leading a potential English-language spinoff or sequel to “Squid Game”?

“I am wildly open to anything,” Blanchett says, leaning back in her chair with a smirk. “And in a world that is so beautifully, magically created like that, for sure. They’re amazing world-builders, and that series has been eaten alive. I don’t think there’s a corner of the globe that it hasn’t touched in some way.”

While there has been speculation that David Fincher, Blanchett’s “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” director, has pitched an English-language series set in the “Squid Game” universe, Blanchett doesn’t have an answer. “I mean, I’d love to work with David again. It’s been ages. But no, I don’t know anything more than you do. I’m not being coy. I really don’t.”

Throughout her career, Blanchett insists she has always been more interested in choosing her various collaborators than playing a specific kind of character, and “Disclaimer” was no different. “I guess that’s why I’ve played characters big and small in lots of different genres,” she says. “It’s more access to different audiences that I am really interested in, because you catch an audience on a different rhythm when they’re at home watching something, or when they’re on the train watching something on a smaller screen, or when they’ve come to the theater. In the end, what I seek is that different connection with them.”