Cate Blanchett names the greatest comedy actor of all time: “She broke all the rules”
As talented and frequently chameleonic as she is, Cate Blanchett isn’t an actor that many people would call hilarious, with out-and-out comedy few and far between in her filmography.
Of course, because she’s a two-time Academy Award winner and one of her generation’s best, she’s proven that she can do it. Don’t Look Up isn’t the finest example, since the movie wasted a star-studded cast on an overwrought parable that always felt like it was trying too hard, but she does have a cinematic funny bone.
Guy Maddin’s Rumours is probably the best, with Blanchett having a ball hamming it up as Hilda Ortmann, an Angela Merkel surrogate who finds the G7 summit going increasingly awry in one of the filmmaker’s signature off-kilter capers, which was admittedly countered by every single attempt at a one-liner in Borderlands falling flat on its arse.
To put things into context, Australia’s only double Oscar-winning thespian has 13 Golden Globe nominations, and only two of them were in the ‘Musical or Comedy’ category. Barry Levinson’s Bandits won’t be remembered as one of her most indelible hours in front of the camera, although Richard Linklater’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette might be one of her most underrated, even if the film itself is a bit iffy.
Explaining why Blanchett isn’t the most gifted onscreen comedic actor doesn’t preclude her from joining the conversation, though, which comes with a heartbreaking caveat. A fan since childhood, the star had dreamed of playing Lucille Ball, only for scheduling conflicts to rule her out of Being the Ricardos.
Fellow Antipodean Nicole Kidman stepped up instead, with Ball’s daughter, Lucie Arnaz, admitting that she was “devastated” when the biopic lost Blanchett. Before she realised she couldn’t play her dream role, the Lord of the Rings alum did a stellar job of outlining why she was as determined as she was excited to inhabit one of her formative icons.
“It’s incredible,” she marvelled. “I mean, you want to talk about astonishing women who have made a lasting impact? You walk onto a film set and you’ve got the female bathrooms called ‘Lucy’ and the male bathrooms called ‘Desi’. She was the first female studio head, for goodness sake, and a mother, and she broke all the rules, and changed comedy, and was this incredible actress.”
There was initial backlash to Kidman’s casting, which she ultimately made a mockery of when she won a Golden Globe and landed an Oscar nomination for embodying Ball, all while Blanchett was forced to watch from the sidelines and see somebody else playing her dream role, and winning acclaim for doing it.
Blanchett is good enough that she probably would have won the Globe and made the Oscars shortlist had she been able to commit to Being the Ricardos, but missing out didn’t change her opinion that Ball is the greatest and most important comedy actor of all time.
