To know Bernadette, city of Seattle is where Blanchett had to go
SEATTLE — Where did she go, that Bernadette? All over Seattle, apparently.
The Phinney Ridge Farmer’s Market. The top of the Space Needle. Buca di Beppo. Wherever Cate Blanchett needed to go to better understand the rant-ridden mind of Bernadette Fox, the title character of “Where’d You Go, Bernadette?” — a film based on the bestselling book by Seattle author Maria Semple.
“I had started corresponding with Maria before we started shooting and I thought, ‘I have got to get to Seattle!’ ” Blanchett said by phone. “So she took me all over. And it was a bloody heat wave! I thought, ‘Where’s the rain, Maria? Where is the rain?’ ”
It turned out to be for the best. During their outings around the sunny city — a walk along the Queen Anne Loop, followed by coffee at Caffe Vita — Semple gifted Blanchett with the sunglasses she was wearing at the time she was working on the book and which are depicted on its cover. Blanchett wore those very shades during filming.
In truth, Pittsburgh doubled for Seattle for much of the movie. While director Richard Linklater was in Seattle to shoot Bernadette walking through the Central Library downtown, the rest was filmed at 31st Street Studios in Pittsburgh’s Strip District. Still, Blanchett needed to sample the city that inspired Semple’s prose and infuriated her character.
“I went on the Bernadette Pit Stop Tour,” Blanchett said. “So I went to the places that Maria hung out in and had really strong pictures in my mind.”
Blanchett bought most of Bernadette’s wardrobe at Baby & Co. on First Avenue; had dinner at Staple & Fancy, where they ate the chef’s menu; and visited Semple’s daughter’s school.
Semple was sure to take Blanchett to “the stuff of Bernadette’s nightmares”: the five-way intersection where Green Lake Way North intersects with North 50th Street and Stone Way North. (“Whoever laid out this city,” Semple wrote in the book, “never met a four-way intersection they didn’t turn into a five-way intersection.”)
“Maria is a satirist, so I think she takes the mickey out of herself as much as she does anybody else,” Blanchett said, using a British phrase that means to tease or mock. “But she does it with such heart. I think that Maria has ascribed to the fact that you can only hate what you love.”
The two-time Oscar winner (for 2005’s “The Aviator” and 2014’s “Blue Jasmine”) spoke by phone from Toronto, where she is filming “Mrs. America,” about the late Phyllis Schlafly, a conservative lawyer who played a major role in blocking the Equal Rights Amendment. The character was a stretch, Blanchett said.
“But it’s always the points of difference that interest me. If you’re constantly playing someone who has the same moral and social and political code, who works in the same profession as you, who loves the same music as you, then, I mean, your worldview and your world experience and your well of compassion becomes pretty dry pretty quick. The world becomes very small.
“So it’s always about playing outside your experience, for me. It’s what I enjoy most.”
It was the same with the character of Bernadette, a once-celebrated architect who endures professional ruin and several miscarriages before moving to Seattle with her Microsoft husband and daughter, Bee. Once here, she throws herself into parenting, enlists the aid of a virtual assistant and has comedic-yet-manic clashes with the community (and culture) of the fictional, private and precious Galer School before making a break for Antarctica, a trip she was supposed to take with her family.
“The title, ‘Where’d You Go, Bernadette?’ is obviously because the character disappears, so that’s no spoiler,” Blanchett said. “But it’s also something that a husband could say to a wife: ‘What happened to you? Where did our relationship go? Who are you now?’ And I don’t think it’s a question she can answer.”
Bernadette has moved so far from who she was and wanted to be, Blanchett said, that she’s lost herself. That sense of self was replaced with “an acerbic, hilarious and relentless mix of hostility and rage and despair that she takes out on Seattle.”
It takes a trip far from Seattle’s coffee shops and intersections for Bernadette to find herself — and realize the problem wasn’t just this place.
“Maria sees the book as an apology to all the people she encountered when she first moved to Seattle because she had an antagonistic relationship to it,” she said. “It wasn’t Seattle’s fault at all.”