Cate Blanchett On Being A Lesbian Icon

Australian actress Cate Blanchett has responded to people calling her a “lesbian icon” with joy. The two-time Academy Award winner took home her fourth Golden Globe Award last week for her role as fictional queer conductor Lydia Tár in the film Tár. 

Tár is a psychological drama film written and directed by Todd Field which follows Blanchett as the eponymous character, who plays a renowned musician in the international Western classical music industry and deals with allegations of sexual misconduct across her career. 

During an interview with Attitude Magazine, Blanchett expressed her excitement at hearing that she was a lesbian icon, stating ““Yeah, baby! That’s so nice”.  

“Don’t know what it means but it’s nice. Yeah, cool, I’ll take it”, she said. 

Characters Are Nuanced

Blanchett described Field’s vision for the storyline and praised his ability to avoid stereotypes that can be associated with characters who are accused of sexual misconduct, like in Tár’s Lydia. 

“The characters are so nuanced. We had a lot of time to discuss their backstory in great detail and to make that manifest in what they did,” said Blanchett. 

“What I love about the story that Todd wrote and the way he directed it and the way we approached it is their same-sex relationship just was. It’s not the subject matter of the film, nor are the characters’ genders.”

Blanchett has previously played a queer role, opposite co-star Rooney Mara in Todd Haynes’ Carol (2015), where she won the Queer Palm award at the Cannes Film Festival. 

In an interview with NPR, Blanchett spoke about her attraction to the role in Carol, stating that the “slippery sexuality and morality that Patricia Highsmith writes” was “so attractive”. 

‘Tár Could Only Have Been Made Now’

“Because it’s – I mean, if you look at, say, Carol’s relationship with her husband, it’s not clear-cut. They have been in love. They have had a child together. The relationship is complicated. You see the men as entrapped by their 1950s identities and the cookie-cutter figures they’re meant to inhabit as much as the women are”, Blanchett said. 

Speaking about Tár, Blanchett described the film as a “meditation on power”, and compared it to Carol, stating that the landscape in which Carol was made had “so few films that were moving over into the mainstream that dealt with same-sex relationships, and also picking it apart so it’s not a monolithic experience.”

“I think Tár could only have been made now. It couldn’t have been made and viewed in a mainstream audience 20 years ago”, Blanchett said.