Cate Blanchett has revealed she suffered a small injury as a result of a chainsaw accident while isolating at her home in East Sussex.
“I had a bit of a chainsaw accident yesterday, which sounds very, very exciting, but it wasn’t,” she said when asked how she was spending her time during lockdown amid the coronavirus pandemic. “Apart from the little nick to my head, I’m fine.”
“Be very careful with that chainsaw,” Gillard chimed. “You’ve got a very famous head. I don’t think people would like to see any nicks taken out of it.”
“I know,” the Oscar winner replied with a laugh. “I wanna keep it on my shoulders!”
Blanchett, meanwhile, continued by sharing that she had already decided to take some time off from work before quarantine. She and husband Andrew Upton share four children together — daughter Edith, 5, and sons Dashiell, 18, Ignatius, 12, and Roman, 16 — and she’s been keeping busy by homeschooling her kids.
“I had taken a year off being a working mother of four, my eldest son was doing his A-levels,” Blanchett explained. “And so I took the year off ostensibly to be with him and support him through that exam period, and then all of that exam stuff evaporated.”
“And, of course, I’m left with an 18-year-old who doesn’t really want to have anything to do with me. So it’s a little bit discombobulating,” she added.
Blanchett added that she is also now acting as a kindergarten teacher to her youngest, adding, “I have huge respect for the teaching profession, I always have.”
“I hope, out of this, that teachers’ wages will be increased and their respect will be, you know, amplified by COVID-19,” she noted.
Blanchett, meanwhile, also touched on her latest Hulu series, feminism and growing up in a strong female household.
“I don’t ever think about my gender, I still don’t until a door is shut to me because of it,” Blanchett admitted, before diving into her family history and early life. “I didn’t understand that there was any separation between being a women and being a feminist… What was confusing to me was that I wasn’t having these conversations with men or boys, I was having them with other girls. So I felt that somehow the language around feminism was driving a wedge between girls and women. So I found that very distressing.”
