SWITCH ON TO DRAMA

Oscar winner stars as an anti-feminist heroine in Foxtel’s Mrs America, writes Michele Manelis

LIKE most parents living in lockdown, 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 tells News Corp Australia: “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,” she laughs.

Ensconced in her $9 million manor house with her playwrightdirector husband Andrew Upton, their sons Dashiell, 19, Roman, 16, Ignatius, 11, and adopted daughter, Edith, 5, Blanchett is 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 explains.

Settling into the role of house wife 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 believes a woman’s raison d’être is simply to support the patriarchy, Phyllis Schlafly has the “dubious honour” of being credited for playing a part in preventing the Equal Rights Amendment from being ratified and in turn 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 a heroine by the Republican Party.

As a women’s rights activist and UNHCR ambassador whose political views couldn’t be further from Schlafly, 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,” Blanchett says.

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 reverse-engineering process of how did we get to where we are?”

Blanchett says her own journey as a feminist was inspired by her schoolteacher mother, June.

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.”

Mrs America airs Tuesdays at 8.30pm on Fox Showcase and is streaming on Foxtel Now.