I met Cate Blanchett in 2021, on the set of Todd Field’s movie “Tár,” in which she was playing Lydia Tár, an apparently formidable orchestra conductor, and I had been cast as a highly scripted and agreeably heightened version of myself. Field had reached out to me months before to say, startlingly, that he had written a movie for Blanchett that also had a character within it bearing my name. Would I play this dubious role? I’d been impressed by Field’s earlier work, and was easily persuaded to trot out my best self-impersonation for reasons partly Goffmanite (like the sociologist Erving Goffman, I’m fascinated by how we all play ourselves as a part) and partly Grouchoite (I am a ham who likes acting in things).
Mostly, though, I was intrigued by the idea of working—even on a pro-am basis—with Cate Blanchett. Like everyone else, I had been watching her in movies for years and had been enthralled by her seemingly limitless gift at impersonation in the elevated, theatrical sense. She’d been effortlessly credible playing any woman, from an elven queen (in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy) to a disturbed New Yorker (in Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine”)—and not just women, come to think of it, since she’d also had a memorable turn as Bob Dylan, in Todd Haynes’s “I’m Not There.” Over the many hours of filming our scene together—a staged interview at a fictional version of the annual New Yorker Festival—I was struck not by Blanchett’s self-evident virtuosity but by her professionalism, which, of course, is the pragmatic form that virtuosity takes. Take after take, she found new things in our very discursive material that somehow added to the whole without ever breaking the continuity of the past take’s work. Meanwhile, in the predictably endless pauses between takes, we conducted a long sotto-voce conversation about Samuel Beckett, Australian theatre, eating in Berlin, and, above all, our children (she has four) and the pleasures and predicaments of raising them.
The other evening, we met for another conversation, at my apartment in New York, for which she’d agreed to play Cate Blanchett while I would continue to play myself. “I was having this sort of inverted stage fright coming,” she told me when she arrived. “It’s like we’re going to rehearse for a scene from a film that we’ve already shot.” But we quickly settled in to talk about listening to music, going before audiences, and the art of acting, seen from both her Olympian height and my Lilliputian lowlands.
This is the most meta occasion that I have ever taken part in. We are redoing, for The New Yorker, a conversation that we simulated in Berlin, pretending to be—
Where you were playing yourself.
Well, I was playing a version of myself. I was playing a part that, in fact, I often play in life, which is . . . the conversationalist, right? But it is a part I play. It is not who I am in any sense. So I was playing that part, but I was also playing myself, as a person in Berlin. So I was playing myself, playing myself, playing myself.
I know. Charlie Kaufman’s going to call.
The first two sentences are my performance. But then you realize that Cate Blanchett is actually giving a performance because she’s playing Lydia, and it’s Lydia who is having difficulty because she is playing herself. That’s Lydia’s predicament: playing herself. Did you have any expectations when Todd Field sent you the script?
No, I don’t know what you felt, but it seemed to arrive fully formed. It’s a bit like “Mork & Mindy.” So, you had to reverse engineer how you got there. And I think that it’s a very challenging film, but ultimately a very rewarding film as a result. Todd’s and my conversations were intensely practical. It was this constantly evolving tsunami of a thing. The process of making it was to try and get as close to the fire as we possibly could and understand what it was, because I think that this erupted out of Todd and that it made complete sense to him on one level. But then he had to deconstruct it in order to actually make it reconstructed.
Todd is not a programmatic artist. He didn’t have an editorial idea that he wanted to execute with this. He had a vision of a particular person navigating her way through the world. Did you feel, when you read it at first, that it didn’t have a program? That it’s genuinely emotionally ambivalent and complex?
And very ambiguous.
Yes.
Maybe that’s what I was trying to say, and I don’t know where you sit as a writer: it’s very hard to not lock down that ambiguity very early on in the process and start to say, “I understand what this is, and I’m going to lean into what I perceive it is,” but allow it to continually evolve and change and grow.
I’ve had it in the theatre. I’ve had a very deep relationship with the director Benedict Andrews. I can see him in my peripheral vision, almost sort of conducting as if I were a silent-movie actress.
And so, [Todd and I], we have this symbiotic relationship. And I can feel that. He’s like Martin Scorsese. He sits not behind the monitor but by the camera. And you can feel the energy. He wouldn’t give line readings, per se, but I could almost feel that I was channelling something through him.
And Todd was not programmatic. He’s also not prescriptive. Normally, when someone has written something as refined and deep and dangerous as the script was when I first read it, you would then think that he would have a scalpel-like approach to the type of performance, which he did not.
Todd has said that he didn’t write it with you as his first choice. He wrote it for you, and if you had not wanted to do it he would not have been able to do it at all. Did you know that when he sent it to you? And what was your first response to the script? Did you hesitate at all?
No, I didn’t hesitate. My agent, Hylda, has known Todd for a long time. And I met Todd ten years ago, when he was working with Joan Didion on a screenplay. I’d obviously seen his films and loved them, and I knew his work as an actor and then discovered he was a musician, so we got on incredibly well. We didn’t stay in contact, but my agent said, “You’ve got to read the script.” And she’s only said that to me one other time, and that was when Todd—the other Todd, Todd Haynes—had sent the script for “I’m Not There.”
I will add that when Todd first got in touch with me, I thought it was Todd Haynes.
So you didn’t know him?
I didn’t. He reached out to me out of the blue and said, “There’s a character in this movie who has your name. Would you be interested in playing him?”
When I read it, I said, “You better call Adam Gopnik.”
Laurence Olivier famously said that he loved to work from the outside in—from costume and makeup and all that. And I was so stunned when we saw images of what you were going to wear. How did you arrive at that? We won’t say the Annie Leibovitz look, but . . .
I watched everyone. It was watching conductors talk about conducting and watching concert musicians and how they presented themselves. And there are many, many documentaries that were hagiographies, really, visual hagiographies that talk about Herbert von Karajan and the persona—
Not to interrupt you, but did you happen to see that beautiful, strange film about Wilhelm Furtwängler and the Third Reich?
Yes, yes, fascinating. All those details, so interesting. But Bina [Daigeler, the costume designer]—we did “Mrs. America” together, and she’s so fantastic. So we talked a lot about it. We started sort of strangely with the hair, because you look at male conductors, and some male conductors talk about distraction on the podium. But what conductors choose to wear or not wear, how to present themselves there, is part of the performance. And they have to walk in as the Maestro. I looked at a lot of male conductors’ relationship to their hair over time.
Like Lenny Bernstein, right?
Yes, exactly. And so then it was also just thinking about: this was somebody who came alive in movement. It’s like when you’re onstage, you have to have the ballet put into a costume, so you can move.
It was also, back to the practical level—they were very long days. So Bina and I talked, we came up with what the silhouette would be, what she wears, and Todd was very, very keen on the baseball cap, so that was kind of a pivotal point. And also being adrift as an American in the classical music of old Europe—talk about a pariah.
I mean, you read a lot about the relationship between von Karajan and Bernstein and this long sort of exchange. Bernstein was never really invited over there [during von Karajan’s tenure]. But I think von Karajan was quite obsessed with him.
They came of age, professionally, at the same moment, right after the war, and von Karajan, who was with the Berlin Philharmonic, famously told his orchestra, “We will make music as you’ve always made music.” And Bernstein is a Jew coming into time when New York was becoming the predominant cultural power.
Yes. It was really, really complicated. All these conversations go into the melting pot. So it made me think a lot about what gives one the right—how many stage hours do you need before you can truly play Blanche, or any of the great roles? Yet these characters are all written in their sort of late twenties, early thirties. Blanche is such a young woman, but she’s such an old soul. That’s the wonderful thing about being in the theatre, that time is such an elastic thing.
I started thinking about [Lydia] not having a mentor. And so who did actually mentor her, and how did she create a sense of an authentic connection back into the music that would give her permission as an American to even get the chance to play this music? Therefore, the construction of self for her was a life raft, and it was quite important to allow the door to remain open.
Yes, exactly. It’s the scaffolding she needs to climb up to the position that she deserves to have. That’s what makes it complicated.
But yet in a visual sense they then needed to give the audience access to her sense of authentic self—even though she’s so estranged from herself and adrift—when she’s in flow, when she’s at the center of that sound.
Martha and I and our son, Luke, went to a screening and watched the movie and your astounding performance. And then we got to the end. As we left, we were having a debate among the three of us, because each of us responded to the very end completely differently. Luke saw it as her vindication: Lydia’s got an orchestra. Whereas I, being a much more conventional person, saw it as a kind of humiliation: she has to do this performance for an audience of cosplayers. And I’m sure that Todd’s intention was the first more than the second, don’t you think? But the beauty of it is the ambiguity of her . . .
Yes, I think it is, because it’s in the name, and she does these anagrams [in the film.]
Once I got to the anagrams, I kept saying, “Tar is such a difficult name. Can you put another ‘R’ on the end of it? It’s Tarr.” I said, “Who’s going to go and see the movie ‘Tar’?” Then I was in Budapest, and the word for “pharmacy”—I had to look it up to pronounce it—it has t-á-r, with an accent. And I took a photo of the “tár” and I said, “Look, at least that gives it some panache.”
Yes. Well, not only panache but you can imagine it gives it a kind of an implicit backstory, right?
Yes.
That Linda as a young girl saw that word in a photograph, or something. . . .
When I saw the anagrams, I was thinking, I can’t play “rat.” He’s so elusive, Todd—wonderfully elusive—but therefore very magnetic and compelling, both as a person and as a filmmaker. He said, “Well, yes, I guess the anagram of ‘Tar’ is ‘Rat.’ I guess it is.” And I said to my husband, “I can’t play that level of judgment. We’ve got to change the name.” And he—my husband—just very simply said, “It’s also an anagram of ‘Art.’ ” I’m so literal, but of course when I first read the ending I was profoundly depressed by it. But then in the performance of it I was utterly liberated.
I had listened to John Mauceri talk about how one of the most difficult things that he’s ever done is having to play to a click track when he does music at the Hollywood level—because you have somebody else’s rhythm and somebody else’s music, and you have to bring it alive. And I thought, I understand that innately as an actor. You’ve got somebody else’s rhythm, particularly when you’re dealing with a new work, which is what a screenplay is, isn’t it? And when someone writes as rhythmically as Todd . . . but, yes, you’ve got to invent something, you’ve got to bring it alive, and you’ve got to throw it all away and make it live with the other actors. So you’re constantly adjusting. I felt, in a way, that it was simply about being at the center of sound, and not having a sense of judgment on what that sound is. It was liberating.
I have to tell you, I was speaking with a wonderful composer who often writes film scores and the ending was the only part of the film he didn’t like, because he thought it was implicitly condescending to movie-score writing, which was the farthest thing . . .
Yes. I don’t know if I told you this, but I had worked for months with Natalie Murray Beale, my friend, who I brought on just to help me with the conducting. I was in Budapest to work out parts of the Mahler. I sort of could read those four or five pages of the score, so I knew exactly what I was talking about. And so I wanted to get the music that would be playing for Monster Hunter. [At the end of the film,] I stand up on the podium. I’d just been moving through the music in my head in silence. But while I was moving through this, in front of the student orchestra, as soon as I lifted my hand the sound started to come, and then they kept going, and so I kept conducting.
Wow.
And then we just kept making this sound together, beyond the part that I had studied.
It was your vindication, your vindication as a conductor.
It was astonishing, because they were leaning in, hungry for direction.
Had you studied piano as a kid? How were your musical skills coming in?
I had. You go and watch Eastern European acting students, and they’ve gone to very expensive academies, and they can all play five instruments and speak seven languages, and they can stand on one hand. And I’m thinking, Well, I speak English, possibly. I played piano as a girl. I played recorder. But what are my skill sets? I kept saying, with every pregnancy, “I’m going to go back and finish my finance degree, and I’m going to pick up the piano.” But it’s a very sad indictment of me. I have to be pushed by a role to go and do that.
I will tell you that I am now thirty-nine years late turning in my Ph.D. thesis.
I think you made up for it.
Well, but not in my family, because all my five brothers and sisters have Ph.D.s except me, so . . .
It’s unfinished business. Competitive unfinished business—even worse.
So, no, it was wonderful to have music come back into my life, because there’s such cacophony in my house. I’ve only been listening to music in a deep way, I think, probably since the pandemic—since a bit of silence came back in, because I had some space in the car.
It was like I was in a floatation pod. I didn’t want a single sound to come into my world. Also, I like vinyl. In a way, albums are like symphonies, put together in an order, because your ear is guided through in a way that completely bypasses the intellect—you can intellectualize it later, but even contemporary music is put together the way an album is produced. It’s so important. The rhythm of it, the sequence of it.
Yes, it’s true, and we lose that.
The shuffle function.
I try and tell our kids about how, when we were growing up, side one and side two of a Beatles album were crucial, and it was crucially different to know what was on side one. Then it came to an end, and you turned it over, and you had a separate experience on side two. And they have no interest in it. But it’s true about the pandemic. It was sort of the last time—or the first time in a long time—that classical music seemed to matter for so many.
I remember at the height of the pandemic, when we all had to Lysol the green beans, that I thought to myself, O.K., every night I’m going to have to Lysol everything we have in the kitchen, so I’m going to listen to Beethoven’s quartets. I’ll finally catch up.
Yes, we were doing very repetitive, monotonous small tasks, so you could really attend. And I think it’s that thing about having these really dense works on as background music. I just can’t do that. I have to sit.
Has it been held over for you from the film to now? I mean, are you carving time just to listen?
Yes, yes.
Oh, that’s fantastic.
And I have to tell you, I had so many moments of pure joy making this film. I’m so reticent to talk about the work of it, because it felt like such a liberation and a freedom, probably in large part because music came closely back to my life. But also being with people en masse, together again—and being in that really dangerous space that I think we so often avoid being in as artists, myself included, but also as humans, between chaos and order—it was so joyous.
Yes, it was a happy set in that way, too.
I don’t think anybody knew on a visceral level that we were making something. Todd and I kept calling it, like, a monster that was locked in the closet. We kept calling it the thing. We never referred to it as a film or a scene. It was the thing.
I remember, in fact, that Todd said to me, when I arrived, “Now we’re going to do the Gopnik.”
The Gopnik, yes.
Language can be an open window, and it can be an island that one swims to, or it can be a homecoming, but sometimes it can be a prison. Maybe that’s why we didn’t talk about it—the thing—too much, because we didn’t want to weight it down.
Or define it.
Because the thing that the audience always is excited by is the question. It’s not the answer.
That’s right.
There are a lot of things that she says that you realize she’s heard—she’s heard Bernstein say that, or somebody else. . . .
In the Juilliard scene . . .
Yes, yes. And there were these little moments where you felt, That’s who she can be. That is her greatness. She doesn’t necessarily see it, because we’re watching her. The audience is a fly on the wall. We know more about Lydia Tár than she knows about herself.
Which is part of her predicament. I was going to say: I was sort of stunned by some of the responses to the film. You’re wise to keep away from it, obviously.
Yes. We have no ownership over it, nor should we. How people define it and lean into it and discuss it is not for us to be involved with in any way.
I deeply believe this to be true. Nonetheless, it is sometimes provoking, because there are things in the film that seem to be so admirable that have been nipped at on occasion, as inevitably happens. One is that the conversation in the film about classical music is élitist or difficult. This seems to me to be the farthest thing in the world from the truth. It’s people who are passionately engaged with their work talking about the work that they do. And that’s part of the joy. It’s like watching “Apollo 13” and saying, “Well, they talk too much about the space program.” That’s the material.
It’s in our moments of passion, whether it be video games or monster trucks or Mahler. That’s when we take flight. That’s when we forget our physical selves, and we commune with the thing. And I suppose I’ve learnt to lean into being more sociable, but I’m inherently quite shy. And I think Todd is as well.
Very.
I’m also grateful that we had this massive thing between us to discuss.
Yes.
We’ve become very good friends as a result, because, by leaning into your passion with other people collectively, you invariably expose parts of yourself unwittingly, both positive and negative.
That’s why I love rehearsal rooms so, because people will bring in the cone of silence. It’s more respectful and, I think, intimate. And so many people have been exposed publicly through the supposed cone of silence of A.A. A lot of stuff gets revealed in a rehearsal room that stays there. It’s very respectful, the ones that I’ve been in.
I was thinking about this when we were working. You’re sort of a theatre-imprinted actor, right?
Creature.
Creature, yes. But that’s still foundational for you—the experience of theatre. I was so struck when we were working together that you would find something new in our exchange each time we redid it, and yet had the discipline to know that it had to be in continuity with everything else you’d been doing for the previous two days.
Yes. I’ve learned to sort of translate the experience that you have from week one to week two to week three, a rehearsal from take one to take two to take three. You go in to try and find something new. I think you’ve got to have a very strong third eye, because you’ve got to slow that bit down, not for internal rhythmic reasons but simply because the camera dolly doesn’t have time to get round there. I can sense that the light is hitting the lens there, and it looks a lot better. So you develop that technical 3-D sense the longer you do it. But the thing that I find—which wasn’t in our scene, because we did have an audience, although they were told where to laugh . . .
So, just to clarify, the audience was told in German where to laugh at the things that we were saying in English.
Yes. But I worked with an actor who has since passed away, a great English actor, and we were on the West End, and he would do this thing—I keep using that word—this technique he had, and the director was getting really cross because he would always get a round [of applause] as he walked off. The director said, “I’ve got to tell him to stop that.” There’s a technique—which I have refused to ever learn—of making people continue to clap at the end.
Right.
And they do it in orchestral music a lot, but you can get around by looking at the audience a certain way. So I knew that that was a skill that Lydia Tár . . .
Would have, yes.
Even though the audience didn’t speak English, they knew when to laugh, because I was giving them the cue. But something I’ve had to learn in the theatre is that I have found curtain call to be an agony.
Really?
Because you’re still coming out of something. It’s like when you go and see friends who have just come off doing a massive gig, and they’re still . . .
They have not yet returned to the other self they play.
Right. It’s my husband’s favorite moment, watching actors just before they go onstage.
That liminal moment.
But I’ve found the exposure of the curtain call—or what seemed to me, as a young actor, the self-aggrandizement of standing up there—to be incredibly difficult.
I worked with a wonderful theatre director, Barrie Kosky, who I was at university with, and he ran the Komische Oper. He’s an amazing pianist, incredible conductor, and amazing director. He’d get really cross with Australian actors about not allowing the audience to have that. He said, “None of that false humility. Stand up there. The applause is for the audience. It is actually not about you. They’ve been sitting there attending to this evening. They complete the circle.” ♦
