Acting is art of pretence, says Blanchett after LGBT rows
CATE BLANCHETT has defended the “suspension of disbelief ” inherent to acting, as she blamed reality television for the backlash against non-LGBT actors for taking roles that do not match their sexuality or gender identity.
The actress, who played a lesbian in the Oscar-nominated Carol, said part of the pleasure of acting was “finding out what makes [the character] tick.”
The Lord of The Rings star made her comments at the Rome Film Festival.
“I will fight to the death for the right to suspend disbelief and play roles beyond my experience,” she said. “I think reality television and all that that entails had an extraordinary impact, a profound impact on the way we view the creation of character.
“I think it provides a lot of opportunity, but the downside of it is that we now, particularly in America ... expect and only expect people to make a profound connection to a character when it’s close to their experience.”
Scarlett Johansson recently withdrew from playing a transgender man in the film Rub & Tug after a backlash, while Eddie Redmayne was criticised for playing a transgender woman in The Danish Girl.
Johansson said she had “learnt a lot” from the trans community and was glad there had been a “larger conversation about diversity and representation in film”. “While I would have loved the opportunity to bring Dante’s story and transition to life, I understand why many feel he should be portrayed by a transgender person.”
Actors such as Sir
Ian McKellen have pointed out that no openly gay man has ever won a best actor Oscar, but that straight actors have frequently taken home the coveted trophy for playing LGBT parts.
“No openly gay man has ever won the Oscar; I wonder if that is prejudice or chance,” he said in 2016.
Referencing straight actors who had played gay men, he said: “How clever, how clever. What about giving me one for playing a straight man?”
Campaign groups have pointed out that 52 straight people have received Oscar nominations for playing gay characters, including both Blanchett and co-star Rooney Mara for Carol.
Blanchett said playing someone with thoughts and experiences different from her own was one of the joys of her job. She added: “Part of being an actor to me, it’s an anthropological exercise. So you get to examine a time frame, a set of experiences, a historical event that you didn’t know anything about. But also I’m about to play a character whose political persuasions are entirely different to my own, but part of the pleasure is trying to work out what makes her tick.”
She said she would like to be a part of more LGBT films, and hoped they were getting easier to make.
“Carol was a real labour of love for me. I’d read the Patricia Highsmith story ages ago... I think now would be made in a heartbeat, but eight years ago, it was a very difficult film to get up. Two women, both of whom are of lesbian-ish persuasion in the 1950s, which is like ‘who wants to go and see that? Only 12-year-old boys go to movies’.
“Thank goodness we’re changing the demographic of the critics who write for Rotten Tomatoes. For me if something is difficult to make.it’s like a red rag to a bull. It makes me want to make it more.”
When it comes to the arts, and particularly the swiftly reacting field of theatre, are we in the grip of a “gender-switch” revolution, and if so, is it OK to question the trend and even feel antagonised by it?
The week’s big West End opening has been Marianne Elliott’s revival of the Stephen Sondheim musical Company. It represents a formidable “surgical” intervention. In 1970 the show was about a New York “guy” called Bobby – an unattached bachelor who offers convivial “company” for his married friends. Now it’s about a “doll” – a womanabout-Manhattan, “Bobbie”, hitting the same dilemmas: stay single or settle down (if so, at what cost to personal freedom)?
I loved the production (as did most other critics) and awarded it five stars, not something I do lightly. I went in sceptical, came out converted. Sondheim’s lyrical wit and musical genius remain intact, yet Company now packs a greater emotional punch, partly due to bringing out the 35-year-old heroine’s resonant anxieties about motherhood.
Will I have persuaded readers of all this? I couldn’t help glancing at the online comments beneath my review, one of which said: “Soon as I read ‘gender-switched’ I stopped reading” – in other words the headline alone was enough to deter the (irate) chap in question.
Some might sneer at such an apparently closed mindset, but I actually felt a spasm of sympathy. Hardly a day goes by, it seems, in which the drums of gender conflict aren’t being angrily banged and barely a week goes by in which a flag isn’t being flown for some new genderbending innovation on stage.
In the space of a fortnight, we have seen a role-reversing Measure for Measure at the Donmar, cross-dressing galore in Emma Rice’s new show, Wise Children, at the Old Vic, and, at the RSC, a Troilus and Cressida that has actresses playing Ulysses, Agamemnon and Aeneas. On Friday it was reported that Judi Dench will star as Old Deuteronomy (habitually a male moggy) in the film version of Cats.
The long-established trickle of actresses taking on “male” roles has become a flood – coinciding with the rise of identity politics and a renewed militancy in feminism. It’s not unreasonable to worry that, irrespective of the value of certain appropriations (and Company argues its case every step of the way), we’ve reached a stage where an egalitarian, patriarchy-assailing agenda is being relentlessly pushed. In the socialmedia age, if you express puzzlement or protest at this redistributive development, you run the risk of being mobbed by abuse. Easy enough to conclude, when alighting on a rave review for a “re-gendered” show, that obliging critics are in cahoots with the PC brigade.
If readers are to trust the reviews, and if theatregoers are to head into shows without feeling they’re liable to be told what to think, then the theatre industry as a whole needs to take instinctive scepticism about the value of gender-reboots seriously. It mustn’t bulldoze its way towards an imagined utopia. Above all, it needs to uphold, loudly and proudly, the artistic freedom not to adhere to a “progressive” orthodoxy. The case must be made, in fact, for gender imbalances, even if that risks not only reflecting historical marginalisation but perpetuating it.
Take, for instance, that other hit, The Inheritance, about the legacy of the Aids epidemic on today’s gay men, which has just started a new run at London’s Noël Coward theatre and is, in my opinion, the most important American play of the 21st century so far. “Where are the women?” you might complain (there’s just one female character, not seen until near the end).
And yet it’s the glaring absence of women (and the way that lone figure, played by Vanessa Redgrave, is atoning for past maternal misdeeds) that gives the story its climactic poignancy. Rejig the gender dynamic and you’d lose that.
So, yes, there are ample gains from watching women “play” men or seizing and re-fashioning male roles – and vice versa. But let’s feel no shame or ire either in casting and characterisation that ignores the wider gender-quake. I’d say that the health of our theatre culture – both in terms of veracity and viability, and the basic compact between paying punter and freewheeling player – depends on it.