OPPOSITE ATTRACTS
Oscar winner Cate Blanchett stars as an anti-feminist heroine in the Foxtel miniseries Mrs America,
LIKE most parents living in lockdown right now, Cate Blanchett has grand plans for her time in isolation.
Speaking from her home in
East Sussex, an hour south of London, the Oscar winner says: “Every day I think, ‘I’m going to get up and read, I’m going to get up and exercise,’ but in the end, like today, I’m making foil unicorns with my daughter.”
Ensconced in her $9 million manor house with her playwrightdirector husband Andrew Upton, their sons Dashiell, 19, Roman,
16, Ignatius, 11, and adopted five-year-old daughter Edith, Blanchett is mostly thrilled to be surrounded by her loved ones.
“Yes, we’re all together, other than my mother, who’s stuck in Australia, which is quite painful,” she says.
Settling into the role of housewife and homemaker doesn’t appear to fit the feminist brief we’ve come to expect of Blanchett, but it does of her latest biographical role in new Foxtel miniseries Mrs America.
A conservative Republican, who believed a woman’s raison d’être was simply to support the patriarchy, Phyllis Schlafly has the “dubious honour” of being credited for playing a part in preventing the ERA (Equal Rights Amendment) from being ratified, and in turn being part of the US Constitution.
Taking on the women’s movement of her time, Schlafly ruffled feathers aplenty in her heyday, and is still hailed as a heroine by the Republican Party.
Blanchett’s introduction to Schlafly paints a curious picture.
“I remember seeing this little old lady in her late 90s, being trucked out at the tail end of Trump’s campaign. There was a standing ovation for her. She seemed to be very, very important and was treated with profound respect by members of the Republican Party. I found out later that that person was Phyllis Schlafly.”
Blanchett continues: “She single-handedly, I think, embedded herself into the spine of the Republican Party, the notion of pro-life and being proAmerican. And feminism was regarded as anti-American and anti-family.”
As a women’s rights activist and UNHCR ambassador, whose political views couldn’t be further from Schlafly’s, Blanchett was intrigued to dive deep into the psyche of such a woman.
“I wanted to understand what was so terrifying and abhorrent about the notion of equality to Phyllis Schlafly and those likeminded [women] around her, and that was the reason I wanted to make it,” she says.
“But first and foremost,
Mrs America is an irreverent human drama. It speaks to a point in history, but one that we haven’t learned that much from,” she argues.
Created by veteran TV writer Dahvi Waller (Mad Men,
Desperate Housewives), the series is a fascinating contrast in the age of #MeToo and Time’s Up.
“It’s quite shocking for an audience, I think, to watch the series and feel like they are back in the 1970s,” Blanchett notes,
“but at the same time, it’s totally in the era in which we’re living right now. The show is a reverseengineering process, of how did we get to where we are?”
Blanchett says her own journey as a feminist was inspired by her mother: “You know, there was a stigma around identifying as a self-actualised woman who felt like she could achieve anything in line with her male counterparts.
“My mother grew up with that sensibility, even though she was a single working parent [Blanchett’s father died of a heart attack when she was 10], with all of the challenges that entails. And as her daughter, I identified as a feminist, but she didn’t.”
There were many aspects of gender inequality that didn’t sit well with the much younger Blanchett.
“When I was at university there was this subject called Women’s Studies, and even then I thought, ‘It’s such a shame that we have to call it Women’s Studies. We can’t just say ‘the stuff of interesting people’? I mean, it’s simply a facet of being human,” she says, clearly still irritated by the name. “And women are human beings, the last time I looked.”
She says the first woman who influenced her in a meaningful way was close to home. “For me personally, being Australian,
I was so profoundly rocked by Germaine Greer,” she says. “I haven’t always agreed with what she says over the years but she’s always worth listening to.”
And these days?
“I think what [Westworld star] Evan Rachel Wood is doing through her platform, and the way she’s connecting younger women to the notion of domestic violence, I find her really inspiring.”
In Mrs America, Schlafly goes toe-to-toe with feminist titans including Gloria Steinem ( played by Rose Byrne); Betty Friedan (Tracey Ullman), Bella Abzug (Margo Martindale); Jill Ruckelshaus (Elizabeth Banks) and Shirley Chisholm (Uzo Aduba). The stacked cast is rounded out by Sarah Paulson, Melanie Lynskey and Mad
Men’s John Slattery, who plays Blanchett’s husband.
The mini-series will no doubt prove vastly educational for younger generations quite unaware of what their female forebears went through.
“I hope Mrs America can do that for families watching it now, because I think there’s a lot of girls and boys from younger generations who think they might know about the plight of their mothers and grandmothers, but in fact, they don’t,” she says.
MRS AMERICA
8PM, TUESDAY, FOX SHOWCASE AND STREAMING, FOXTEL NOW
MRS AMERICA IS AN IRREVERENT HUMAN DRAMA. IT SPEAKS TO A POINT IN HISTORY, BUT ONE THAT WE HAVEN’T LEARNED THAT MUCH FROM