I meet her the day after receiving her latest award, proclaiming her as "Champion of Humanity" for her work as a Goodwill Ambassador for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR). The award was presented to her at the El Gouna Film Festival, held last October in Egypt, on the shores of the Red Sea, just a few days after the peace agreement was signed in Gaza, a few hundred kilometers away in Sharm el Sheikh.
I imagined her to be of average height, neither tall nor short, slim, with very fair skin as a good Australian, and those piercing blue eyes that look through you when she gazes at you. I also saw her as somewhat distant, stoic, and very composed. Serenity was the word I would have used to describe her. Complete calm.
My impressions do not change when I see her appear with her team: she is dressed in white, including sneakers, and wears a good amount of makeup. But when she greets me, a handshake and a genuine smile break down the initial barrier that I had erected. She is not distant. On the contrary, she makes an effort not to be.
Cate Blanchett laughs when I remind her that it was indeed in Egypt where she stood in front of a camera for the first time. She was 19 years old - now she is 56 - studying Economics and Fine Arts and traveling around the country. "I had very little money and ended up staying in a rundown hotel in Cairo. They printed passports there, everything seemed quite suspicious. There was a guy recruiting people to participate in a boxing movie, they paid five Egyptian pounds and gave you falafel. And I was hungry and had no desire to be an actress. In the end, I ended up in a music video. It was a surreal experience, and they didn't even give us the falafel, so I quit," she recalls with laughter.
So yes, Cate Blanchett laughs freely, no longer seeming so reserved in her gestures. And it is evident that she loves talking about her work, which we will soon see on screen. Firstly, her role in the movie The Elixir of Immortality, a science fiction comedy directed by the Zellner brothers, where she plays the leader of an alien gang.
Secondly, the film she is currently shooting written by Alice Birch, "an incredible playwright who worked on the script for the series Succession," as the actress points out, titled Sweetsick where she portrays a woman who can see what other people need.
But it is when she talks about her work with refugees that her deep involvement becomes apparent, gesturing and striving to make the other person understand the stakes involved. She begins with praise for the host country, Egypt, which currently hosts "more than one million registered refugees and asylum seekers from about 60 nationalities; the vast majority are from Sudan (around 75%), followed by Syrians (approximately 11.5%)."
"It is very important," she emphasizes, "to tell the story of countries like this, which are at the center of a sandwich between, on one side, major displacement crises, and the most politicized and violent genocide on the other, yet they keep their borders and hearts open."
Ibrahim is Sudanese, the country that Cate Blanchett mentions the most when talking about refugees. As of writing these lines, UNHCR reports warn of increasing violence forcing thousands of people to flee their homes again. An estimated 26,000 have fled in recent days from El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state, and more are expected to do so in the coming days. In addition to fighting, extortion, arbitrary arrests, detentions, and looting, there have been widespread sexual violence against women and girls by armed groups. The UN agency reports that Sudan is experiencing the world's largest displacement crisis.
By this point in the conversation, there is nothing left of the reserved Cate Blanchett. She gestures, asks me if I agree with what she is saying, showing that her arguments come from within. And when I ask her if we are going to leave our children a world worse than the one we found, she responds, "That's what keeps me up at night. Because we are facing the perfect storm, aren't we?" and adds, "We are becoming increasingly passive in the way we consume, in how we obtain information, and even more so with the rise of Artificial Intelligence, which enhances that passivity and erodes our sense of reality. If we add to that the geopolitical situation and climate change, we are in serious trouble. Humans have hit rock bottom as a species."
After goodbyes and repeated thanks, Cate Blanchett stands up and asks someone from her team, "What's next?" The actress has returned.