Cate Blanchett has played many complex, complicated, misunderstood women (her Best Actress Oscar was for Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, in 2013a).

But in Apple TV+’s Disclaimer, Alfonso Cuaron’s seven-part series about a documentarian whose deepest, darkest secrets come to light in a novel written by an unreliable narrator, the two-time Oscar winner, and now three-time Emmy nominee, embodies an embattled woman who loses control of her own story.

“The challenge for me, and I suppose the painful reality, was that when you play a central character in a narrative, you invite an audience not necessarily to have empathy with you, but you invite them into your character’s point of view,” Blanchett says.

“Disclaimer” was the “antithesis” of that conventional wisdom, forcing Blanchett to sit in others’ judgments of her character, Catherine Ravenscroft, until she finally reclaims her story in the harrowing finale.

Disclaimer forces viewers to confront their own biases and the cultural vilification of so-called “bad” women.

“I think if you go back and watch it a second time, there’s a crude picture of Catherine that the people were assembling for themselves that didn’t have a lot to do with who she was or what she did, or the impact that she was having in the room,” says Blanchett.

In the finale, Catherine finally confronts Jonathan’s father, Stephen (Kevin Kline), whose late wife, Nancy (Lesley Manville), had written the novel based on a false perception of her son’s final days.

But what really happened was that the night before his death, Jonathan had broken into Catherine’s hotel room, forced her to pose for nude photographs, and then violently sexually assaulted her.

“To know that you were moving through and unpicking an audience’s often intractable judgments of what had gone on was a profound relief,” says Blanchett, who recalls feeling much lighter after shooting that extended, 40-page monologue all in one take.

The devastating final twist was a secret that Blanchett fought to keep. “There are many tangential conversations I would’ve loved to have had about what happens when you sit with abuse, and the various different ways that people bury this trauma,” she says.

“The courage that it takes still in this day and age to stand up and say it, even after you’ve been sitting on that shame, and the attendant shame that comes for people who are victims of abuse — I feel like it would’ve been great to use the series in a way as a launchpad to talk about that stuff. You can’t make that stuff happen, but I’ve had quite a few people stop me in the supermarket to talk about that.”

Blanchett is looking to venture further into television. In 2020, she earned her first two Emmy nominations for FX’s “Mrs. America,” as both an actor and producer. Having always been actively involved in the development of a show, she is now “particularly keen” to join a series “that is fully formed.”

Squid Game

Last year, she filmed a top-secret cameo for the final scene of Netflix’s Squid Game, in which she played an unnamed American recruiter who the Front Man (Lee Byung-hun) acknowledges and sees playing ddakji with a homeless man in a back alley. The offer “came out of the blue,” and Blanchett was given little context.

“Because it’s such a cult series and they were shooting in L.A. of all places, everyone was on a need-to-know basis,” she recalls. She didn’t even do a costume fitting; the production asked her to bring her own suit. “I got a couple of storyboards. I had to learn to play the game very quickly. I had to practice and practice. I knew there were five setups that they were going to do, and I knew what they needed from every shot, and then I was given the sides. But it was one of the more mysterious jobs.”

The surprise casting of a movie star of Blanchett’s caliber suggests that Netflix is exploring new ways to keep the IP alive. Is she open to lead a potential English-language spinoff or sequel to Squid Game?

“I am wildly open to anything,” Blanchett says, “And in a world that is so beautifully, magically created like that, for sure. They’re amazing world-builders, and that series has been eaten alive. I don’t think there’s a corner of the globe that it hasn’t touched in some way.”

While there has been speculation that David Fincher, Blanchett’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button director, has pitched an English-language series set in the “Squid Game” universe, Blanchett doesn’t have an answer. “I’d love to work with David again. It’s been ages. But no, I don’t know anything more than you do. I’m not being coy.”

Blanchett has always been more interested in choosing her various directors- collaborators than playing a specific kind of character.  “I guess that’s why I’ve played characters big and small in lots of different genres,” she says. “It’s more access to different audiences that I am really interested in, because you catch an audience on a different rhythm when they’re at home watching something, or when they’re on the train watching something on a smaller screen, or when they’ve come to the theater. In the end, what I seek is that different connection with them.”