LOS ANGELES — For centuries, girls throughout the English-speaking world have fantasized that they were Maid Marian getting rescued from damsel-in-distresshood by that dashing hero Robin Hood.
Cate Blanchett wasn’t one of them.
“I don’t know if all girls were like this, but I always dreamed about being Robin Hood,” the acclaimed Australian actress, who celebrates her 41st birthday today, revealed during a recent phone interview from England.
In the latest screen incarnation of the legendary bandit of Sherwood Forest, simply called “Robin Hood,” Blanchett sort of gets her wish. As the film’s more respectfully referred-to Lady Marion Loxley, we see her in the opening sequence firing flaming arrows at a pack of feral boys. She spends the middle portion of the movie sparring more than flirting with the returned Crusader Robin Longstride (Russell Crowe), who for various reasons must impersonate her long-gone (and recently deceased), knighted husband.
And by the movie’s climactic beach battle with an invasion force from France, well … we don’t want to spoil the plot, but how many leading ladies just sit demurely by in action movies these days?
Approached by co-star Crowe to join the project at a ceremony where several Aussie stars were being honored with postage stamps, Blanchett was soon eager to sign up for the fifth collaboration between Crowe and English director Ridley Scott (“Gladiator,” “A Good Year,” “American Gangster” and “Body of Lies” were the others).
“I liked what Ridley was interested in,” Blanchett said of the prequel-like take on the story, which emphasized contemporary concerns about government power and economic oppression implicit in Robin Hood’s “steal from the rich, give to the poor” ethos. “He’s a working-class guy from the North, so he’s always had a healthy disrespect for authority, and he feeds that into this.”
Even more to Blanchett’s liking, “Ridley wanted Marion to be her own woman rather than a damsel in distress — I suppose, closer to what the reality would have been like if the men had left the village to fight a long war. You don’t sit around weeping into your lace handkerchief; you get down and you start making day-to-day life bearable. You kill the animals, you till the land, you organize the micro-society.”
The classically stage-trained Blanchett has raised a few swords before — at the climax of her second film about Queen Elizabeth I, on occasion as the elf queen Galadriel in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy — but Marion required a new set of supposed skills.
Agriculture is no easy task.
“There’s a beautiful, almost Drer moment where I’m leading the plow and the horse — in clogs!” Blanchett laughed. “It was a challenge, but it’s acting. I think it was much harder for the guys who were doing day after day of combat in all that gear.”
For that very reason, “Robin Hood’s” numerous and elaborate combat scenes, several of which she participated in, gave Blanchett an appreciation of Scott’s people skills as well as his technical ones.
“Because Ridley is such an old hand, he knows how demanding it is and he doesn’t want people’s energy to flag,” she observed. “So he’ll choreograph this really long, complicated sequence, and then he’ll hide 17 cameras around so they’ll only have to do two or three takes.
“He’s like Spielberg in the sense that they both have, in the best way, ADD,” added Blanchett, who had a blast playing the sadistic Soviet nemesis in Steven Spielberg’s “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.” “If something’s not working, they’re not going to linger and try to make it work. They’ll cut out of that idea and, before they lose the light, do something else. Because they have such an incredible understanding of the medium, they can do that.”
As for working with the mercurial Crowe for the first time, Blanchett said it was a joy. And not just because he’s a fellow semi-Aussie (his folks were New Zealanders who moved to the continent when he was a boy; Cate’s father was an American who settled in Melbourne).
“I admired Russell and I’d met him at various places,” she explained. “So this was great. The wonderful thing about it is that, when you finally do work together, I’m so invested in the success of other Australian actors, the progress of their careers and the choices that they make. I think it’s because we’re a country the size of North America, but we’ve only got 20 million people, so you kind of have a proximity to what’s going in other peoples’ lives who are working in the same industry. I loved it.”
Blanchett spent more time on stage than on soundstages Down Under before the first “Elizabeth” movie rocketed her to international fame in 1998. After living primarily in England for a number of years, she and husband Andrew Upton returned to Australia to raise their two boys (which have since become three) closer to family. The couple were named co-directors of the Sydney Theatre Company in 2006; Liv Ullmann directed Blanchett as Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire” there last fall.
Filmmakers have generally viewed Blanchett as adept at just about anything. She won an Oscar for her portrayal of Katharine Hepburn in Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” and among her numerous nominations is one for playing, of all people, Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There.”
Artful and respectable as her filmography may be, Blanchett sure seems to dig taking part in big action movie franchises. (She said she has yet to be approached to reprise Galadriel in the upcoming “Hobbit” movies, though.) “Robin Hood” bears aspects of both endeavors, with its politicized portrait of a historical era and the story’s long lineage of having inspired signature adventure shows for nearly a century.
“Of course, there have been a lot of filmic renditions, all the way back to Douglas Fairbanks and up to Kevin Costner,” she said. “My sons are enamored with the modern costumed version that English television has at the moment. They’re all quite different, and one for every age.”
As for her own screen association with larger-than-life British figures, Blanchett is both unimpressed with herself and rather floored by how things have turned out.
“I suppose the ‘Elizabeth’ films put you into that category,” Blanchett said. “But you mix it up a bit by playing Bob Dylan, or I went back and made an Australian film a couple of years ago.
“But I’ve had an extraordinary set of experiences. And, look, I’m constantly surprised by it, absolutely.”
