“There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say this has happened to me. And the so-called average woman on the street, person on the street, is saying MeToo. Why does that get shut down?” In 2018, when she was president of the jury in Cannes, Blanchett took part in a red-carpet protest. She and 81 other women appeared on the steps of the Palais des Festivals, symbolically representing the number of female directors who
had been selected for Cannes’ competition lineup. Over the same period, 1866 male directors had been selected. “I’m still on film sets and I do the headcount every day. There’s 10 women and there’s 75 men every morning,” Blanchett said at the weekend event in Cannes. “I love men, but what happens is the jokes become the same,” she said. “You just have to brace yourself slightly, and I’m used to that, but it just gets boring for everybody when you walk into a homogeneous
workplace.” Blanchett, who won a best actress Oscar for her role in the 2013 Woody Allen film Blue Jasmine, also said at Cannes that performers should work with “problematic” artists caught in scandals if they were willing to address the harm they had caused.
Cate Blanchett, #MeToo movement, Hollywood gender imbalance, Cannes Film Festival, film set diversity, entertainment industry news