Cate Blanchett has said the #MeToo movement “got killed very quickly” in Hollywood, speaking at the Cannes film festival. The Australian actor lamented that the tide of the gender equality movement had been turned in the industry.
“It got killed very quickly, which I think is interesting,” Blanchett said. “There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say this has happened to me. And the so-called average woman on the street, person on the street, is saying me too. Why does that get shut down?”
Blanchett, who was president of the Cannes jury in 2018, took part in a red-carpet protest that year with 81 other women, representing the number of female directors selected for the competition lineup compared with 1,866 male directors. She noted that on film sets, she still counts “10 women and 75 men every morning”.
“I love men, but what happens is the jokes become the same,” she said. “You just have to brace yourself slightly, and I’m used to that, but it just gets boring for everybody when you walk into a homogeneous workplace. I think it has an effect on the work.”
Julianne Moore also spoke at Cannes about gender disparity, recalling being one of two women on a set around 2016. “I can remember being on a set not too long ago where the only women were me and the third AC [assistant camera],” she said. “It’s when Hillary Clinton lost the election, and we were both devastated. And I said ‘Look around the room. We’re the only ones here.’”
Blanchett also revealed she will star in Brady Corbet’s next film, an “X-rated” feature set in the 1970s, alongside Selena Gomez and Michael Fassbender.
