Hollywood star Cate Blanchett feels the need to ‘constantly justify’ her career in her native Australia. She said that she hates strangers asking her what she does for a living when she’s in Down Under because she doesn’t think her craft is ‘celebrated’ in the way it is in the UK and US, where she spends a lot of her time, reported ‘aceshowbiz.com’.
“The worst thing for us as actors in Australia is getting in the back of the cab and a cabbie asking, ‘What do you do?’ because you think, ‘Oh, God’,” she said, according to the ‘Courier Mail’ newspaper, during an event at the Roslyn Packer Theatre at the Sydney Theatre Company, which she and husband Andrew Upton ran from 2008 to 2011.
She added, “You’re constantly having to fight for the space or to justify the fact that you have the right to be an artist in Australia. But yet, overseas, our culture is celebrated, sung and praised, but we don’t often do it internally. We don’t often know what we have here. And living and working overseas, I can see absolutely objectively what we have here.”
The 54-year-old actor admitted promoting homegrown stories, such as her new movie ‘The New Boy’, which follows an Indigenous youth with supernatural powers set in outback Australia during World War II, is a priority for her.
Cate said, “Any chance I have to amplify that and to find ways for that work to get out overseas and be celebrated, but also to be celebrated here, is deeply important to me.”
Last month, the Oscar-winning star caused a stir when she joined Sparks on stage at Glastonbury to dance to their song ‘The Girl is Crying in Her Latte’. But the actor insisted she had no idea the performance would be such a talked-about moment and insisted nothing about it was planned.