Cate Blanchett had no problem switching between playing two badass heroines: “Borderlands” leader Lilith and fictional conductor Lydia Tár.
The Oscar winner prepared for Todd Field’s 2022 feature “TÁR” between takes during the “Borderlands” production, she told Entertainment Weekly.
“Perhaps if you’re doing two things that were vaguely similar, it might be a little bit confusing,” Blanchett said, “but you couldn’t get two more diametrically opposed projects than ‘Borderlands’ and ‘TÁR.’”
Her “TÁR” performance went on to earn Blanchett another Oscar nomination in 2023. “Borderlands” will be released in theaters on August 9, 2024.
“I was so grateful, actually, to be in Budapest [filming ‘Borderlands’] because I met this incredible concert pianist who happened to have time because it was [COVID-19] lockdown, who took me into the Academy [of Music], who took me into the opera house,” Blanchett said. “That’s where I had my piano lessons and helped choose all the music, and I had my conducting lessons online on the weekend.”
She added of preparing on the “Borderlands” set, “When you’re doing something as physical as [‘Borderlands’], you can only go up and down on a harness so many times before they have to turn the set around. There’d often be an hour where I had the time to sit down and look at the score. I always thought I was going to do needlepoint or knitting, but no.”
Blanchett’s “Borderlands” co-star Jamie Lee Curtis even remembered Blanchett being in her full “Borderlands” costume and conducting.
“I was like, ‘What are you doing?’” Curtis said. “She said, ‘Oh, I have this job I’m going to next.’ She went straight to Berlin from Budapest. That’s how long ago we made this movie.”
Blanchett previously told Empire that she joined Eli Roth’s action film to escape her “COVID madness” of quarantine at the time.
“The crazy asks are usually the things I gravitate towards; the things I could never conceive of,” Blanchett said. “I think there also may have been a little COVID madness — I was spending a lot of time in the garden, using the chainsaw a little too freely. My husband said, ‘This film could save your life.’”
