Cate Blanchett’s characters are often someone other than themselves: Lydia Tár, the orchestra conductor lead of Todd Field’s gleefully ambiguous Tár (2022), grew up Linda Tarr in Staten Island. Family members of Jasmine, of Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine (2013), often call her Jeanette accidentally, before rolling their eyes at her name change (her mother named her for her favorite flower, she lies to a potential lover). In the Sydney Theatre Company’s 2013–14 touring stage production of Jean Genet’s The Maids, as the servant Claire, she slips in and out of her employer’s finery, pretending to be her as she conspires with her sister, also a maid, to murder her. Blanchett even once played Bob Dylan, another shapeshifter, in Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There (2007). And as the fictional journalist Catherine Ravenscroft in Disclaimer, a limited series debuting this fall on Apple TV+ directed by Alfonso Cuarón, she experiences her own life restaged and revealed by a character in a mysterious novel.

Not infrequently, the narrative of Cuarón’s films appears to be just out of view. The filmmaker’s international critical success, Y tu mamá también (2001), follows a menage à trois—two Mexico City teens and the Spanish wife of one of their cousins—on a road trip to a beach that may or may not exist. During long takes as they flirt and bicker while driving down rural highways, we see wedding parties, police inspections (the trio are never pulled over), crucifixes marking accidents, a funeral—that is, the stuff of life. In Roma (2018), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale among other accolades, the semi-autobiographical bourgeois family stays to the scenes’ fringes as the story follows Cleo, a housekeeper played by first-time actor Yalitza Aparicio—who also became the first Indigenous American to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

Top by Jil Sander. Trousers by Margaret Howell.

Cuarón’s films often decline to follow Hollywood’s strictures. Even the box office-hit survival thriller Gravity (2013)—which stars Sandra Bullock as an astronaut stranded in orbit for whom everything that could go wrong does as she attempts to get back to earth—feels like a high-anxiety procedural experiment. Disclaimer, Cuarón says, is perhaps the most narrative he’s ever gone—although he seems to treat this plottedness as a formalist concept in its own right.

The work of both Blanchett and Cuarón encompasses tremendous range. For those like me who were school-aged in the aughts, one was likely introduced to them by Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy (2001–3) and the third installment in the Harry Potter franchise (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban [2004]), respectively. Driven bored by “pandemic madness,” Blanchett recently acted as Lilith in Borderlands (2024), an Eli Roth-directed adaptation of the sci-fi video game series.

A poise unifies Blanchett’s characters—a poise that often threatens to undo itself. Many are powerful. The titular queen of Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth (1998) is widely considered her breakout role, and she is able to imbue dynamism and a conflicted inner life to a character that in lesser hands would appear silly, impulsive. More recently, she acted as a fictional German chancellor in Rumours (2024), directed by Guy Maddin, Galen Johnson, and Evan Johnson. In her own life, she is keenly attentive to the influence she wields: In 2023, she joined with producer Coco Francini and University of Southern California professor Stacy L. Smith to launch Proof of Concept, an accelerator program for women, trans, and nonbinary filmmakers.

In my favorite roles of Blanchett’s, whether as the semi-closeted eponymous protagonist, starring alongside Rooney Mara, in Haynes’s Carol (2015) or as the troubled schoolteacher in Richard Eyre’s Notes on a Scandal (2006), she speaks in language that feels not affected or artificial but more eloquent and precise, certainly, than that of most interlocutors you’ll encounter in “everyday” reality. In real life, she appears no less crystalline and rigorous—only, in comparison to her many knotty characters, she is more generous, curious, quick to laugh. Cuarón likewise channels thought as if he were a live wire—his words, like his film’s endings, always reconfiguring what’s just come before.

“I never think about a character as being static. We’re very contradictory, elusive creatures.”

Dress and trousers by Phoebe Philo. Shoes talent’s own.

Cate Blanchett: There are so many images in Roma which will be deathbed images for me, because they stay with you and interact with other things that you see in ways that you can’t form a conscious relationship to. Sometimes we don’t embrace that possibility—or the powers that be, that are going to fund the project, are frightened of that. Because they don’t think the audience will lean into it, because the algorithm shows they like this and they like that; they like this and not what you’re about.

Alfonso Cuarón: And also because they’re looking at the explicitness of everything. The way I film is not unlike how you approach performances. Your performance is so much about what you’re not seeing. You’re performing, you’re doing something, but the important thing is about what you don’t see.

Cate: What’s concealed.

Alfonso: Exactly. What is concealed.

Cate: We spend 95 percent of our time trying to conceal so much. It’s exhausting. [Laughs] And when you finally have a frank and clear conversation… Particularly at the moment—I don’t know about you, but I feel conversation is a minefield.

Alfonso: You have to tread very carefully.

Cate: I understand people are on tenterhooks. It used to be that you’re saying, ‘What are you going to do in 2026?’ And well, ‘Oh, that’s so far away.’ But people say, ‘What are you doing in six days’ time?’ And you think, I just can’t make any decisions right now. Because everything is up for grabs. And as a result, I think there’s this collective anxiety that we bring to bear to every single conversation that makes it very difficult to hear what other people are actually saying. Disclaimer is being dropped into a time when people’s ability to hear what is behind what is being said has been eroded.

Jacket, skirt, and shoes by LOUIS VUITTON.

Alfonso: Everything happens too quickly. Too quickly, too quickly, too quickly. So people are forced to make very quick judgments. There’s not enough time for reflection. And that transcends into conversations. Now, it’s as if you don’t state the point very clearly from the beginning, your point is lost immediately. And you can see how it happens in social media. How it’s affecting a lot of our behaviors and how the media is having an influence with this. You have a lot of people giving opinions for you. I trust that audiences can read reality. If you introduce a character who has a wealthy house and from the first scene, pretty much, they’re toasting with a very expensive wine, and then you cut to a character who lives in a more middle-class house and you see that it hasn’t been maintained for decades and everything is kind of let go, there’s really a contrast there.

Cate: A contrast in sympathy?

Alfonso: Yeah. Your audiences are going to take their stand. Just because of that class dynamic. And definitely in most of my films there’s always a dynamic that works around social class because it’s a dynamic that exists.

Cate: It’s interesting because I think that in [Disclaimer] you play not just with the power dynamics between people, but also who controls the narrative, whose perspective is driving the way we are being told the story.

The plot in Disclaimer is almost like an entrapment. It’s inviting you into a certain narrative that could become a cul-de-sac if you don’t remain intensely alive to the other perspectives, and the way those perspectives are juxtaposed against one another. I’ve certainly never been part of anything that is as narratively complicated to negotiate your way through as an actor—and, I think, as an audience—in a good way. This experience has something quite different.

Jacket by LOUIS VUITTON. Trousers by Phoebe Philo. Earrings by LOUIS VUITTON High Jewelry.

Alfonso: Definitely. I have never done something so overtly narrative as this. But I wanted to experiment. I wanted to try it and give it a go. I want to learn from it. At the beginning of Disclaimer, Christiane Amanpour says, ‘Beware of narrative and form.’ And that’s also something that I might be suspicious of in film. I prefer when films are built upon thematic breaks, rather than narrative per se, or plot-driven breaks. I think from the thematic, then everything else arises. It’s about trying to be consistent and honest with the theme, or trying to explore it, trying to understand the theme.

Cate: And that was a very interesting thing to play with, because we do get trapped inside other people’s versions of events. I mean, history is always told by the victors, and the struggle that a lot of people in power are having is that people who are traditionally the vanquished are suddenly having their perspectives told, which is very unsettling [to ‘the victors’], and so there’s a really interesting interplay in terms of narrative power, and who gets to hold the storytelling stick. I found it distressing, actually, to spend so much time playing a character who was either prevented from speaking or couldn’t find the words herself to actually get her story out, which results in a monumental set of judgments that are made about her. I kept thinking, What is the audience going to make of her and what they think she’s done, or hasn’t done? I felt that power play between us as makers of the work and the audience, in terms of when the information was revealed.

We are rarely who we say we are. It’s a classic Stanislavskian exercise you do where you break down what your character says about themselves, what other characters say about them, and what you say about other characters. Somewhere between all of those different versions of identity lies a truth of who that person might be. I never think about a character as being static. We’re very contradictory, elusive creatures. And most of the time, we don’t want to look at what we’ve done, what we’ve said in our past. We’re much more focused on the future or the good side of ourselves. And in that way, I think we’re all self-mythologizers to some degree. Apart from me, of course. [Laughs] I’m definitely not.

“If certain forms or a way of interacting with the filmed experience—however that manifests itself—have become homogenous, that’s really dangerous.”

Top and trousers by Phoebe Philo. Shoes talent’s own.

Alfonso: I tend to like long takes in the films that I’ve been doing because of a couple of things: one is that as important as the foreground is the background. But also, to try to capture everything in real time. What I like is the whole dynamic which, when you create the scene, it’s about a moment that is going to happen between the actors that are completely transforming into their characters, and the dynamics that they take. Because when you are doing everything by cut, you can, with certain precision, control the outcome. Because even if an actor shows you an array of performances, then in the cutting room you can control exactly what you want. When you’re doing these kinds of scenes, you don’t have that control. Everything becomes a random moment that, if you’re comes together in a way that is a priceless moment. It is very different to craft. It almost happens randomly, because of all of the elements. And I’m not talking about the performance, but all the technical elements.

Cate: It’s that feeling of being on a roller coaster. When there’s fewer and fewer cuts, there is greater anticipatory anxiety. Once a cut is finally made, it actually means something. And, from an acting point of view—and I do think from an audience’s point of view as well—sometimes narrative makes rhythmic sense. It happens in the edit. But if it can happen on set, you’re all on the same page. It invites a slightly different way of working, which I really warm to.

Alfonso: And when you’re creating all of this, there’s these dynamics that happen. And so no take is the same.

Cate: So you have to make choices.

Alfonso: You have to make choices. And yes, it keeps you on your toes. Because you know that, whatever you do, there’s no safety net.

Cate: [In theater] your relationship to an audience is entirely different, and the presence of an audience is vitally important to the quality of the evening, whether they fully participate or participate partially. But both of those forms—theater and film—are symbiotic, I never see them as being mutually exclusive.

Alfonso: But there is something different. There is a big difference when you do a scene like the scenes that we did, that you’ll repeat, I don’t know, 12, 14 times. They are very intense scenes which you have to do pretty much in one day, maybe two days. In a very short period of time. And you have to kind of absorb the older moments that happened with a character that lead to this moment. Surely it’s very different than this moment in which you’re an actor ready to come out on stage. The theater quiets, you come out, you start performing something that you’ve been rehearsing for a month—you already have a whole background, and you’re building the moment as you go.

Top and trousers by Phoebe Philo. Shoes talent’s own.

Cate: You’re talking about the end result of a rehearsal process—and I think the audience might think that, when actors walk on stage, what they’re seeing is the end result of something. But each performance is part of an ongoing process. When I started working in film, I stupidly thought that must be so easy because actors in film get to work and work and work until the moment is perfected. And then the director will cut all the rough bits off, and then the whole endeavor is perfect. And then of course I land on a film set and it is strangely like a theater rehearsal. From take to take, you’re building; you’re growing something. What’s different is that in a theater rehearsal room you’d put that ‘take’ aside and you wouldn’t visit that again for two weeks. And then you put the whole thing together, like a director does in a first assembly, and say, ‘This is a pile of shit, who’s gonna see this? [Laughs] It’s awful! How can I salvage this?’ The hardest thing for me in film is that it does eventually get locked off. This part, to me—when an audience will finally see something that has been filmed—it’s like opening night, but the object is final. Whereas in theater, maybe that’s where the difference is: you go out to rehearse and refine as if for the first time, in the first or second take. That’s where the nerves spring in, or the superstition. You say, ‘I know the first line, [but then] I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ You trick yourself. That’s when the theater lives. I think it dies when it’s just by rote repetition of something that you’ve rehearsed and prepared earlier. You have to find it again, with the ensemble, every night. You have to salvage it, again and again.

Alfonso: In that sense, you’re never done with it.

Cate: No, you’re never done.

Alfonso: I know actors, who when you say, ‘We’re going to do this in one take,’ they…

Cate: …they panic.

Alfonso: They panic. It’s either remembering all the lines or the positions… Also I think that—particularly actors that do mostly cinema—are used to a certain methodology, that suddenly you say, ‘Well, we’re going to do all of that.’ And it depends so much on the relationship with the other actors. Because once you’re there, the actors become your editor. They are going to give you the rhythm, they’re going to give you the dynamic.

Cate: Or not. [Laughs]

Alfonso: Or not! But what I’ve also recognized is that audiences are constantly evolving. And it happens hand in hand with how cinema, or the arts, change and evolve. I think it would be a mistake to impose on younger generations the forms of the past. Because there’s a new sensibility, there’s a new morality. It’s a different world. And with that comes new forms, the forms that they adopt, and they understand and they feel excited with. That doesn’t mean that you cannot appreciate what is in the past. But I don’t think you can impose the past on the present.

Jacket by Phoebe Philo.

Cate: But if certain forms or a way of interacting with the filmed experience—however that manifests itself—have become homogeneous, that’s really dangerous. Because, case in point: Disclaimer. People might watch one episode, or they might watch four, and then how big a screen are they gonna watch it on? That’s something that we talked about a lot. You can still make something that has the quality of being cinematic if it’s going to be watched on a smaller screen.

Alfonso: And what you’re talking about, I guess, is diversity. Not everybody needs to like absolutely everything.

Cate: That doesn’t mean it’s not interesting or worthwhile. I mean, you’re an extraordinary filmmaker, but I was so fascinated by the fact that you produced The Disciple [2020], which I saw in Venice at the festival, and I was so mesmerized by that film. It whistled in my ears in a way that no film I’d seen before had. And I thought, But how is this going to be seen? And the fact that you were championing it: you really understood that those things need care to find an audience that is out there, that will be engaged by that work.

Hair Sam McKnight at Premier Hair and Make-Up using Hair by Sam McKnight. Make-up Mary Greenwell at Premier Hair and Make-Up using Armani Beauty. Manicure Michelle Humphrey at LMC Worldwide using Essie. Set Design Samuel Overs at New School. Photo Assistants Will Grundy, Ryan Rivers. Stylist Assistants Eli Richards, Belinda Nelson. Tailor Maria Carenza at Karen Avenell. Animal Handler Trevor Smiths at Animals Work. Hair Assistant Kumiko Tsumagari. Make-up Assistant Francesca Leach. Set Design Assistant Henry Hawksworth. Production Director Lisa Olsson Hjerpe at CHAPEL Productions. Assistant Producer Taki Vlahopulos. Casting Director Tom Macklin. Post Production Lever Post.