Kapur’s instruction to Blanchett—and to the rest of the cast—was to forget the first film entirely. “The only way to get out from under the weight of it was to pretend it never happened,” he says. The fact that Blanchett was a very different actress than she was in 1998, a veteran versus an ingenue, he says, helped avoid the specter of pale imitation. “I knew from the first film that Cate was of a very, very high and very challenging intellect,” he says. “But on this movie she was relying more on unknown things. I think that comes a little with age and with having done all these films in between but also because of motherhood. When you become a mother, there is a love that comes that you cannot completely intellectually explain. She’s embraced that not everything in life is completely tied up and completely solved.”
Blanchett agrees that Dashiell, five, and Roman, three—whom she refers to as “these sweet-smelling little dumplings”—have tweaked her technique. “When you see children play, you realize that you have to have the same flow that they do, to be able to move in and out of states,” she says. Both boys were born in England, where Blanchett and Upton, a playwright whom she met on the set of a small Aussie film called Parklands in 1996, settled almost by accident in 1998. “I was doing a play in the West End and Andrew got an agent in London, and we just lumped there really, but never with an intention to stay,” she says. Though the family had a house until recently in Brighton—where they were part of an Aussie expat social scene that included musician Nick Cave and photographer Polly Borland—it becomes clear, as Blanchett whips a pocket-size photo album out of her bag and starts flipping, that Dashiell and Roman have thus far grown up mostly on movie sets. Here’s Roman at two on the set of The Golden Age, his face caked in white Pan-Cake and punctuated by enormous penciled-on eyebrows. Here’s Dash getting a drum lesson from one of the musicians on I’m Not There. “And I just weep every time I see this photo,” says Blanchett, turning to a shot of her eldest, at age four, posing in a knight costume on the Golden Age set. “There’s one shot where I’m sitting on a throne surrounded by knights. And he came in in his Marks & Spencer knight’s outfit and was standing there so proud. Tommy, the first A.D., told him, ‘Dash, you go stand right back there, and you can protect the Queen.’ He stood there, his sword up, and with every take he embellished it.”
