Cate Blanchett is addressing ageism and s€xism in Hollywood, both past and present.
In an interview with Business Insider published Monday, March 24, the Black Bag star said, “The shelf life of actresses when I first came on the scene was about five years.”
Nowadays, though, “I think that female producers have more agency,” said Blanchett, 55. “There’s more females in the writing room, and the more diverse the industry is at base level, when things are developed, the more exciting it is for audiences.”
While “there’s ageism and sexism in every industry,” the actress told Business Insider of Hollywood in particular, “I just think that we’re a very public-facing industry.”
Blanchett spoke about getting older in a March 2024 interview with The Sunday Times surrounding the release of her film The New Boy, saying she doesn’t find aging “confronting at all.”
“Because that is like when you stumble across a photo of a holiday when you were 16 or one of my husband and me when we got married. It doesn’t produce regret or shame,” she explained. “Rather, a recognition of the joy of the experience, or a painful moment.”
“I’m transported right back,” the two-time Academy Award winner added.
In her new espionage thriller Black Bag, Blanchett plays Kathryn St. Jean opposite Michael Fassbender‘s George Woodhouse, married British spies who aren’t always honest with each other out of necessity, like when national security information is at stake.
When George is put in charge of uncovering a potential traitor at the National Cyber Security Centre, he looks into several coworkers — played by Naomie Harris, Tom Burke, Marisa Abela and Regé-Jean Page — as well as his own wife.
In a conversation with PEOPLE earlier this month, Blanchett said, “The weird thing about these characters is they work so closely with one another, and so they know operationally so much about one another and have a lot of information on one another, but yet they don’t actually know what’s going on with each other.”
“There’s an interiority to the characters that they have no idea about, no matter how many high-stakes operations they’ve been involved in together, which is a very weird thing to play,” Cate Blanchett added.