How madness drove Cate Blanchett to her worst movie: “This film could save your life”
A lot of us went a little stir-crazy during the pandemic, especially during that first round of lockdowns in the spring of 2020. As Hollywood A-listers were posting breathtakingly tone-deaf videos from their mansions about how we were all in it together, it was easy to surmise that they were not, in fact, in it like the rest of us. Still, in certain parts of the world, lockdowns were so strict that even the most privileged of people couldn’t leave their (admittedly luxurious) homes, and it wasn’t a welcome break for everyone.
Cate Blanchett was one of them. The two-time Oscar winner and year-round icon behind such cinematic perfections as Carol, Tár, and Black Bag has admitted that the whole thing took a toll on her rather quickly. A cursory rundown of her filmography shows that she is the type of actor who works a lot. She’s averaged three or four movies and television appearances per year for more than a decade, often playing lead roles that require months of preparation and research. To go from movie-hopping around the world to a complete stand-still must have been a shock, and she apparently didn’t handle it well.
“I was spending a lot of time in the garden, using the chainsaw a little too freely,” she said in an interview with Empire in 2024. Things were clearly getting out of hand, and it was only one month into lockdown number one. At the time everything shut down, she was being courted to play the Vault Hunter Lilith in Eli Roth’s adaptation of the 2009 video game Borderlands. It is no accident that she only accepted the offer once the pandemic had set in.
After all that manic gardening (can you picture Cate Blanchett trying to cut a bunch of tulips with a chainsaw? Where’s that movie?), her family stepped in. “My husband said, ‘This film could save your life,’” she recalled. And she took him at his word.
Hearing Blanchett talk about Borderlands is a bit like hearing Jennifer Coolidge talk about A Minecraft Movie; there isn’t a whole lot of personal history to draw upon. “My thumbs can barely control a phone,” the Oscar winner said, “But I bought a PS5 and we played each other.” She is, after all, Cate Blanchett, and you don’t earn eight Academy Award nominations by winging it. She got deep into the game, researched cosplay, watched makeup tutorials on YouTube – basically went down a very pandemic-coded rabbit hole that happened to come with a massive paycheque.
Even Blanchett and her famously forensic research skills could not shine the steaming pile of excrement that is the Borderlands movie. The bar for video game adaptations is hovering a hairsbreadth away from the very bottom of the proverbial barrel, but they still tend to do big business at the box office. No matter how terrible they are, they still have massive fan bases that turn out, quality be damned. The Minecraft movie is currently making that point.
But not Borderlands. It turned out to be a catastrophic failure for Lionsgate, eking out $33 million at the box office off of a budget of an estimated $120 million. As far as Blanchett was concerned, though, it was a great investment. She got to trade in gardening for gunfighting during a time when most people were panic-buying loo roll and wondering whether to take up sourdough baking. A shrewd calculation if ever there was one.
