Cate Blanchett Laments #MeToo Movement's Decline in Hollywood

Cate Blanchett has lamented that the #MeToo movement “got killed very quickly” in Hollywood, while speaking at the Cannes film festival.

In a wide-ranging, staged conversation on Sunday, Blanchett lamented that the tide of #MeToo has been turned in Hollywood, where she has been outspoken about gender equality.

“It got killed very quickly, which I think is interesting,” said Blanchett.

“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 me too. 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, representing the total number of female directors who had been selected for the Cannes competition lineup, compared with the 1,866 male directors who had been selected over the same period.

“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.

“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. I think it has an effect on the work.”

The year Blanchett was president of the jury, Cannes was criticised for including only three films directed by women in its 21-film official selection lineup. Blanchett then defended the festival, saying that change was “not going to happen overnight”.

Julianne Moore also spoke at Cannes on the weekend about gender disparity on film sets, saying she believe numbers had improved in the last decade.

Speaking at a Kering Women in Motion talk on Saturday, Moore recalled being one of two women on a set around 2016. “I can remember being on a set not too long ago where the only women were me and the third AC [assistant camera],” she said. “It’s when Hillary Clinton lost the election, and we were both devastated. And I said ‘Look around the room. We’re the only ones here.’ I’ve certainly seen more gender representation in crews. It was unusual, when I was coming up, to see women on a crew.”

On Sunday, Blanchett revealed she will star in The Brutalist director Brady Corbet’s next film, an “X-rated” feature set in the 1970s, alongside Selena Gomez and Michael Fassbender.