2012.02.24 凯特-布兰切特，剧院老板

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Cate Blanchett, theatre boss
Since 2008 Cate Blanchett has been running a theatre in Sydney with her husband, Andrew Upton. Now she is returning to Europe in an Australian production of a German play

Feb 24th 2012 (Updated Oct 20th 2015)

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By Jo Lennan

Sydney, mid-november. A slice of harbour shows through the window of the converted wharf, but no one is admiring the view. Within this office, the pressing question is whether to banish two yapping puppies, a black Labrador and a mix-breed blonde.

“Maybe it’s punishment,” says Cate Blanchett. Her tone is dry, her garb unassuming, and she is wearing horn-rimmed glasses. There’s no trace of celebrity gloss, but Blanchett is striking without it—five foot eight, and slender. Turning to her husband, the playwright Andrew Upton, she speaks above the din the dogs are making. “You got Dorothy when I went into ‘Uncle Vanya’ rehearsal last year, and then Fletcher arrived as soon as we started ‘Gross und Klein’.”


“That’s it,” Upton says. To those who know him—not the public at large, but people in theatre circles—his defining feature is his impish grin. Today, however, he has a more sober air. “It’s a way of stopping you doing plays,” he says, deadpan.

We’re in the office the two of them share as joint artistic directors of the Sydney Theatre Company. If you’ve seen Blanchett on fewer screens of late, this is the reason why. Alongside raising a young family—three sons, aged between ten and three—the job has been Blanchett’s and Upton’s life since late 2007, when they moved from Britain to take it on.

In the end the puppies are led out by a personal assistant, and we get down to business. This is the largest theatre company in Australia: it has a turnover of A$30m (around £20m), stages over 1,000 performances a year and gets 300,000 people through its doors.

Quite a few actors have made the jump to running a theatre, from Shakespeare and Molière to John Malkovich and Kevin Spacey. Blanchett’s and Upton’s predecessor, Robyn Nevin, had long been a fixture on Australian stages. But unlike her, Blanchett leapt into management from the heights of a prolific career in Hollywood. It was a dramatic shift, possibly unprecedented for a female star who is also a young parent: Kevin Spacey doesn’t have three small sons to deal with. She hasn’t cut back on acting: while her film credits have thinned out, she has been busy on stage in Sydney, Washington and New York. This afternoon, she has a day to go till the opening of her latest play.

“It’s going to be something,” she says. You would know the voice; it has a distinctive timbre, deep and airy at the same time. As she talks she moves about, re-tying her platinum hair, or shifting to sit on the floor when lunch is set on a coffee table. This brings me to one revision: her outfit is not entirely unassuming. As she folds her feet beneath her, she exposes a pair of glitter-encrusted brogues.


In person, she is engaging, earnest, unmistakably smart. The room is cluttered, with a Newell Harry artwork on the wall that says, “No point being king shit of turd island”. Below, on a low green couch, Upton follows keenly as his wife gives an answer, and sometimes interjects. At times they sound like characters in a play: something sparse and modern.

“When you say it’s going to be something,” Upton says, “you mean it’s not going to be nothing.”

“Yes,” says Blanchett. “That’s what I mean.”

They’re getting at the fact that “Gross und Klein” is not an easy play to stage. Written in the 1970s by the Berlin playwright Botho Strauss, it is often described as episodic—meaning that the story exists, but is somewhat skittish. Blanchett thinks of it as a quest, with her character, Lotte Kotte, setting out “to be useful, to do good works, to find communion with people”. Though, as Upton adds, “it could also just be a woman who’s grieving.” Either way, doing the play was one of the first ideas they had in the job, and they commissioned a new translation from the British playwright Martin Crimp. After its season in Sydney, the production will tour Europe: from March to June, it goes to the Barbican in London, the Théâtre de la Ville in Paris, the Vienna Festival and the Ruhrfestspiele in Recklinghausen—so this remade German play will not escape the eyes of the German public.

It’s an audacious venture. The question is, will it work? It’s striking that neither Blanchett nor Upton is willing to say if the play is good. Blanchett is even briefly deflated to hear that I am going to the opening night—“I was hoping you’d come later in the week.” It’s a curious thing to hear from someone who has five Academy Award nominations, and who took an Oscar home for playing Katharine Hepburn in “The Aviator”. But this is theatre, and Blanchett, like any stage actor before press night, doesn’t quite know how it will go.

“It’s the interesting thing about theatre that gets neglected,” says Upton. “Everyone remembers that it’s live, which is a good thing, because it is live and it happens before your eyes, unlike television, YouTube and films. But it’s the importance of the audience in the actual making of the work [that tends to be forgotten]. The moment an audience joins a work, it starts to become a play. Until then, it could be anything, it could be nothing.” He seems the more vulnerable of the two, though it may be his mood, which he later describes as “stinky”.

Asked why audiences in Europe should turn out to see this Anglo-Aussie take on a German play, Blanchett’s pitch is modest. “Well, they haven’t seen it for a really long time.”

Upton is more expansive. “It’s like taking ‘Streetcar’ to America, which was also a kind of hubris,” he says. (They did that in 2009.) He could have added that Americans were fine about it; the play sold out in Washington and New York. Instead he says, “There is a possibility that we will lend a new perspective to it.”

I had assumed that Blanchett would feel at ease appearing in Sydney. Her career began on the stage here, including one of the two at the wharf. But home crowds can be hard to please. “Look, we love working here,” she says. “But often what happens is that work isn’t valued until it has an international pedigree.”


“It is an Australian thing,” says Upton. “But it’s not just an Australian thing. I think everyone’s nervous about what strangers think of them.”

Catherine blanchett met Andrew Upton some time in the mid-1990s. Neither of them now remembers the date, though Blanchett did retain one impression of the man she later married. “The first part of your body that I actually met,” she says, “was your bottom.” The way she tells it, both were at the house of a friend, helping on a short film, and Upton had his head in the oven. Upton neither confirms nor denies the story, but says it was on an Adelaide set in 1996 that they “got on”. So well did they get on, they married before the next year ended.

Their backgrounds were not dissimilar. “Dead middle class” is how Upton puts it. Blanchett, born in 1969, grew up in an art-deco suburb of Melbourne. “A lot of hidden communal spaces,” she says. “My childhood was basically me trying to be Trixie Belden or Nancy Drew on my bike, dropping notes that I would then kid myself I hadn’t dropped, treating them as clues.” Upton, born in 1966, grew up in suburban Sydney and had his own outdoor exploits. He and his brother used to build sleds and test them on the hills, adding a slick of kerosene to make them go faster.

In the background for both were outsider fathers, men who had made good. John Upton, raised by his sister above a Derbyshire pub, became a doctor. Robert DeWitt Blanchett junior, known as Bob, rose from poor beginnings in Texas to become first a sailor and then a successful ad man. “I don’t know how he survived his childhood, to be honest,” Blanchett says. What Bob did not survive were his middle years; he died of a heart attack when Cate was ten. From then on, things were up to her mother June, a schoolteacher, and her grandmother, who had Depression-era habits (“not wasting things”). Her mother, Blanchett says, “was quite provocative as a parent, always questioning the banal assumptions I’d make about things”.

That influence mattered, because the Australia they grew up in knew how to do banality. Asked about the era, Upton points to the poem “Australia” by A.D. Hope, which depicts “a vast parasite robber-state/Where second-hand Europeans pullulate/Timidly on the edge of alien shores”. Both of their schools had something of that tone—Blanchett graduated from the Methodist Ladies’ College, Upton from the King’s School, the oldest grammar in the country. Looking for reinvention, they both switched cities: Upton went to the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne, and Blanchett chucked in her course on economics and fine arts at Melbourne University to enrol at the National Institute of Dramatic Art in Sydney.

So far, so like many a twentysomething. That changed with what came next: in Blanchett’s first year on the professional stage, critics handed her not only the best newcomer award (for playing a bride in Timothy Daly’s musical, “Kafka Dances”), but also the one for best lead actress (as the student in David Mamet’s searing “Oleanna”). That brought a swag of roles for stage and screen, then her first feature film, “Paradise Road”. And the year that film came out, 1997, was Blanchett’s annus mirabilis. She married Upton, made the offbeat romance “Oscar and Lucinda” (opposite Ralph Fiennes) and was spotted for the part that would propel her to international fame, the title role of the young queen in Shekhar Kapur’s “Elizabeth”. Kapur got hold of one of her films, having heard people rave about “this girl they’d seen on a stage in Sydney”. He told a reporter later that it was “like the first time I saw Meryl Streep in ‘The Deer Hunter’. Then, I said, what a star, someone fascinating to watch.”

Cut to nearly a decade later, and Upton and Blanchett are living in a Georgian home in Brighton with their two sons. Blanchett, at 37, has since appeared in more than two dozen films. She has built a film career that seems to let her do as she pleases. She has played some standout leads, ranging from her reprisal of Elizabeth to a very modern woman in “Notes on a Scandal”, a schoolteacher come unstuck, and she has won an Oscar for a supporting role. She has shown an eye for a good small part, from the gullible socialite Meredith in “The Talented Mr Ripley” to a jittery Bob Dylan in “I’m Not There”. Even the mishits have been interesting, from “The Shipping News” to “The Life Aquatic”. She manages to take roles in blockbusters—the elf queen Galadriel in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, a KGB villain in “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”—without denting her status as a serious actor. She promotes a skincare brand, like so many actresses, but at least chooses an interesting one, SK-II.

She kept her hand in on stage by playing Ibsen’s “Hedda Gabler” in Sydney and New York—adapted by Upton. His career, during Blanchett’s rise and rise, had been building too, in a back-of-house kind of way. While writing original works for theatre and screen, he also found success adapting classic plays.

In November 2006, Blanchett and Upton were back in Sydney, directing a bill. At a press conference at the wharf, they announced that they would be staying, and taking up the running of the Sydney Theatre Company. Surprising news, even to insiders (or especially to insiders, since the job had not been advertised). They were widely praised for their commitment, but there was some carping, too. “Luvvies at ten paces”, one headline ran, as an actor, Colin Moody, cast doubt on whether an Oscar was a sufficient qualification for running a theatre company.


Others took aim at Upton, accusing him of riding on his wife’s coat-tails. Self-deprecating by nature, he wasn’t likely to argue. (“You don’t want to know about me,” he tells me at one point. He has also been known to refer to himself as “the hand”—the one bit of him that tends not to be cropped out when he and Blanchett are photographed on the red carpet.) So why, exactly, did they make the decision to upend themselves? And why did Blanchett, at the height of her prowess as an actress, remake herself as a manager?

Half a decade on, surrounded by the keepsakes and detritus from dozens of shows, the two give different answers, at least at first. Blanchett talks of the inspiration that comes from the country you grow up in, a sense of creative challenge. “It’s important to dislocate yourself, to go outside your comfort zone, which includes coming back.”

Upton starts by saying it was good for their sons—the weather, a familiar school system—before veering into what sounds like a case for not taking on the job. “This work is hard. Not the kind of hard that grazes your knuckles or breaks your back, but it’s still hard. And our audience doesn’t really give a shit, when it comes down to it. The standard of critical conversation is low. I’m not just saying that as a whinge. It is.”

Blanchett, rationalising: “That’s because elsewhere you get seven or eight reviews...It’s important to look at the drawbacks of what you’re embarked on, too.”

Upton has his head in his hands as he speaks, lost in concentration. “But despite all that, or because of it, there is this urge to create. And it goes back to what you were saying before.”

Lifting his head, he looks to Blanchett. “This is the only country we owe anything to. So we came back.”

“To answer the call,” says Blanchett.

Upton is more blunt. “To pay the debt.”

In gauging what the two have made of their tenure, we may as well start with the books. Theatre is not about profit, but this company depends on selling tickets—it gets less than 10% of its budget from government funding. So the finances offer a rough guide to backsides on theatre seats. First, plays starring Blanchett herself have had the biggest takings. When she played Blanche DuBois in “A Streetcar Named Desire”, directed by Liv Ullmann, it was a sell-out both in Sydney and on tour, taking A$2.7m (about £1.8m). The papers hailed that year’s results as a “Streetcar-led recovery”. Her starring role the following season, as Yelena in “Uncle Vanya” with Richard Roxburgh and Hugo Weaving, did even better—ticket sales nearly tipped A$3m (£2m). Blanchett and Upton have also worked to woo corporate sponsors and boost private bequests; donors have ranged from Giorgio Armani, who became the company’s patron, to old boys from Upton’s school. After four years of losses, the company has had two surpluses in a row, and the board has extended their contracts until the end of 2013.

They could not have had these results without succeeding in the crux of the role—the task of putting together a 12-play season every year. Theirs is mostly a curatorial function, more to do with ideas and collaboration than a focus on one major show. And they have been able to pull in big-name directors—not just Ullmann, but Steven Soderbergh and Philip Seymour Hoffman. “She caught me at a good moment,” Soderbergh says of Blanchett, with a laugh. “I was so happy with her performance in ‘The Good German’ that I was inclined to say yes to anything.” When he got to the wharf, he liked the vibe: “very collegial, very open, fun”.

The money has also provided a buffer for riskier plays, such as “Bloodland”, premiered in October 2011. Staged without surtitles in the Aboriginal language of Yolngu, it received a standing ovation on opening night. “It doesn’t involve making money,” Upton says, “and it does involve making the enemy of the odd subscriber.”

“Cate and Andrew have come to the party on commissioning Aboriginal work,” says Wayne Blair, who wrote “Bloodland”. “They’re risk takers. I feel like they’re leading the way a little bit with the way theatre is run in this country.”

The inevitable doubt when a star becomes a boss is whether they will have much appetite for the detail. Blanchett passes the test: she is ready to talk you through the numbers, the ways they are rejigging the internal workings, right down to the transport arrangements—when a former premier of New South Wales, Kristina Keneally, told her the wharf was to get a late-night bus route, Blanchett hugged her, saying it was the best news she’d had all year.

When they announced their plans in 2006, Blanchett told the press, “We’re a team.” And that much is obvious from seeing them together. They work closely, too, with the company staff; employees speak of both with irreverent affection.

Upton’s own work hit a glitch when his play “Riflemind” misfired in London in 2008 and closed early, sunk by poor reviews and the financial crisis. His adaptations, however, have had dream runs—“The White Guard”, which he also directed, met acclaim, as did his “Uncle Vanya”: Ben Brantley wrote in the New York Times that the three hours he spent watching it were among the happiest of his theatregoing life.

The fiercest criticism has come offstage, where Blanchett and Upton have tried to take a lead in cutting carbon emissions. They “greened” the wharf, installing one of Australia’s largest arrays of rooftop solar, plus water recycling and harvesting systems. It was no easy feat for a heritage building. In 2011 Blanchett weighed in on the debate about the Labor government’s plan for a carbon tax, joining other prominent figures in a television campaign that backed the measure. She copped some vitriol from Rupert Murdoch’s papers, and a swipe from the floor of Parliament. “People who live in eco-mansions have a right to be heard,” said Tony Abbott, the opposition leader. “But their voice should not be heard ahead of the ordinary working people of this country.”

Someone who is happy to defend Blanchett’s position is the Labor minister Peter Garrett. As the former frontman of a rock band, Midnight Oil, Garrett knows what it’s like to make the leap from artist to advocate. “The fact is you can be a first-class actor,” he tells me, “and also have a mind and a view about one of the most important issues in front of us.” He points out that Blanchett hasn’t come out of nowhere on this. He first came across her working on environmental campaigns—he was president of the Australian Conservation Foundation from 1989-93 and again from 1998-2004. With climate change, he says, “Cate had been one of those people who was prepared to stand up and be counted on that issue quite early.”

This time around, Blanchett knew what she was in for. “I happen to be an actor,” she says. “I happened to be perhaps the most recognisable face, and so the easiest target for people who wanted to take a negative spin. You’re pretty naive if you think that’s not going to happen.”

Will the criticism keep her from sticking her neck out again? Now and again, a question gets short shrift from Blanchett. A firm “No.”

“It was a media beat-up”, Upton says, “that was following a very clear editorial line. It’s fine that there be an editorial line. It’s a pity that there’s so few other editorial lines, but that’s just what it’s like living in the world.”

The opening night comes on the heels of a hot, bright day. The dark of the theatre is delicious, as is the sight, on stage, of a single cocktail on a spot-lit bench. When the lights come up on Blanchett, she is seated and straining away, as if to listen. “Hear that?” she says. “Outside. Two men, pacing up and down, endlessly.”

Her tone is hammy, almost conspiratorial. The audience laughs and she keeps it up, getting four more laughs in the first minute, then a fifth for the rapturous way she goes at the drink. The comedy comes as a surprise, although it shouldn’t: this is the actress Geoffrey Rush once called a “toothy clown”. Here she plays Strauss’s Lotte as a captivating dag, to use an Australian term—a dork, hooking the audience in before there is any sense of the trials in store.

“We have to do something very tricky,” says the director, Benedict Andrews. “You’ve got 800 audience members, some of whom are here because it’s Blanchett, being taken through this unusual example of European post-modern writing, but laughing and crying and following her all the way through.” Andrews signed on late when the original director, Luc Bondy, pulled out to have surgery. Andrews didn’t walk in cold; he is a regular guest director at the Schaubühne, the Berlin theatre where “Gross und Klein” first played in 1978. And he had directed Blanchett before. “She has the most extraordinary access to her emotions that I’ve come across in an actor,” he says. In rehearsal she is “always on the tips of her toes, always very alert”—and, usually, the last of the actors to leave. The previous time Andrews directed Blanchett, in 2009, she was playing Richard II in a mash-up of Shakespeare’s history plays—“there were a lot of other kings demanding attention.” This time, it’s Blanchett who has to carry the audience with her, and she does.


“She’s as good as anybody I’ve seen,” Steven Soderbergh says, “and I’ve seen a lot of people.” He remembers a moment on the set of “The Good German” when he asked her to deliver a line not as an observation but as an accusation. “That’s literally the only instance I can think of where I said ‘Tilt it this way’,” he adds. “She understood it completely.”

Upton says how much he likes the physicality of “Gross und Klein”, the amount of movement that Andrews has worked in. It’s a good decision, because Blanchett is a terrific mover. This was surely why Martin Scorsese had her play Katharine Hepburn, a woman raised to ride and wrestle and play golf. At times in “Gross und Klein”, Blanchett does slapstick and bad dancing. At other moments, she moves like a sorrowful mime. In all, it’s a tour de force.

Three days and three shows later, Blanchett and Upton are at their regular lunch place, a café behind the wharf. It is noon on a nondescript Tuesday. Back to being an ordinary mortal, Blanchett chats with the waitress. No one else pays attention, except for a passing colleague who offers congratulations on Saturday night’s performance. “Oh, you came,” says Blanchett, sounding grateful. Today she and Upton are both a little faded. Their youngest son, Iggy, got them up at four this morning—and that on the back of a show night.

“It’s not a job that’s ideally suited to a young family,” Blanchett says. They make it work by alternating as parent-on-duty. “I think the cost really has not, in the end, been the children, because they’ve always got one of us. It’s that we don’t see each other very often, unless we are in the green room.”

The other sacrifice has been on the film front. “I haven’t really been able to make any films,” she says. Well, I say, she has made some—“I could make ‘Hanna’ [a Euro-thriller] because they could squeeze me into three weeks over the school holidays, and we had some relationships that we wanted to forge and foster in Berlin.” So she was still doing the day job. “Then the volcano erupted in Iceland and I got an extra week. But it’s not really possible. It’s complicated, because I’m committed to acting on stage and have done it at least once a year, and that means on a very prosaic level not putting the children to bed for six weeks, so then I don’t really want to go off and make another film.”

From the age of 38 to 42, her film work has been mostly cameos. Asked if she is sad to let parts go by, Blanchett replies with what sounds like a yes and a no. “You are very acutely aware that you’ve only got one life, but maybe I’m just slow in that realisation.”

Upton, for his part, says he’s only just grasped this fact. Working at the theatre company, he hasn’t had time to write new plays. So what will he write when he’s done? “Something other than opening-night speech cards,” he says, grinning. And both he and Blanchett perk up when they talk about the future. Suddenly the ideas are firing: things they want to do, things they want to see at the wharf, everything from a stronger engagement with Asia to urban regeneration on their doorstep—far too much for one story. “Write another!” Blanchett says. She’s an enthusiast, really. “You do all this, and you think—you hope—it’s really important.”

At the café, lunch is done, and ahead is an afternoon of meetings, then the next show. “But you know, yesterday afternoon I took the kids to a shopping centre out in Woop-Woop”—Australian for Nowheresville —“where usually they say, ‘You look like that actress.’ Or ‘I loved you in “Titanic”.’ Yesterday a woman said, ‘What are you doing in Sydney?’ ‘I live here,’ I said. ‘I run the Sydney Theatre Company.’ ‘Oh do you?’”

Blanchett says it with a stress on the “do” and a rising inflection, deftly catching the shopper’s surprise. Then, with a glance at Upton, she is herself. “But,” she says, “we love it.”

The roles that got away
What parts, like the one above, might Cate Blanchett have landed if she had been available for more than cameos over the past few years? David Thomson speculates

Since we’re talking about a great actress, she would surely have been considered for the best female part of the last few years – Carrie Mathison in the TV series “Homeland”. She’s a bipolar CIA fanatic who thinks an American soldier just returned from imprisonment in Iraq may have been turned by al-Qaeda. So she gets so close to him she has an affair with him. But we know this part is so good now because Claire Danes is phenomenal in it. Who has done a smarter, more emotional, or more disturbed woman in a cockpit of suspense? Cate Blanchett would have been ecstatic and nerve-jangling, but Danes went beyond that by being such a surprise.

Tilda Swinton played the mother of a teenage serial killer in Lynne Ramsay’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin”, and she was remarkable. No one relishes a contest with Tilda. But if you’d seen the novel or the script in advance and been asked who you thought was right for it, Cate Blanchett would have been an obvious answer. And she has something in common with Swinton: they can go from posh to trash, and smart to dumb, with ease.

If I were Lars von Trier (and it’s a relief that I’m not), my only indecision over “Melancholia” would have been which part to offer to Blanchett – the stunned victim of depression (played by Kirsten Dunst, who won the acting prize at Cannes) or the other sister who is worrying herself sick over the end of the world (played by Charlotte Gainsbourg). Cate could have done either part – she could have done them both. Suppose the sisters are twins. Now, for the first time, I wonder if I wouldn’t mind being Lars von Trier, finding ways to make Blanchett manic as well as depressive.

As you play this game, your thoughts become a little wilder at every step. How about Blanchett as “The 40-Year-Old Woman with a Dragon Tattoo”? After all, no one is ever going to stop Lisbeth Salander, so one day she’ll be 40 and just as tough. Blanchett might need three months in the gym to get ready, but she’d be a knockout with that tattoo draped across her body, and we know she can do alienated, insolent and don’t-mess-with-me: the evidence is there in “Elizabeth”, “Veronica Guerin” and “The Missing”. Any actress in her 40s would jump at the challenge of creating Salander at that age, and getting to ride the motorbike. Meryl Streep could play her tattoo artist, with Max von Sydow as the journalist Mikael Blomkvist.

Remember that Blanchett has already played one of the Bob Dylans in “I’m Not There”, as well as “Richard II” on the Australian stage. So it’s a logical next step to cast her as George Smiley in “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy”. Didn’t we always know that some of the fellows in MI5 weren’t quite what they seemed to be? So how about a trans-gender? It would explain why Ann Smiley was so bored with “George”. Can’t you just see Cate with horn-rim specs, a civil-service haircut and the dry-as-toast impassivity that Gary Oldman took from Alec Guinness? That off-centre point of view is exactly what le Carré’s stuffed men’s club needs. And just this once, Smiley could smile.

photograph steve forest



凯特-布兰切特，剧院老板
自2008年以来，凯特-布兰切特一直与她的丈夫安德鲁-厄普顿在悉尼经营一家剧院。现在，她又回到了欧洲，出演了一部德国戏剧的澳大利亚版本。

2012年2月24日（2015年10月20日更新）

作者：Jo Lennan

悉尼，11月中旬。一片海港从改建后的码头的窗户中露出来，但没有人在欣赏这美景。在这间办公室里，迫切的问题是是否要放逐两只狗，一只黑色的拉布拉多犬和一只混血的金发狗。

"也许这是一种惩罚，"凯特-布兰切特说。她的语气很干脆，她的服装不显眼，而且她戴着角质眼镜。没有一丝名人的光泽，但布兰切特没有光泽也很醒目--五英尺八英寸，身材苗条。她转向她的丈夫，剧作家安德鲁-厄普顿，在狗的喧闹声中说话。"去年我进入'万尼亚舅舅'排练时，你得到了多萝西，然后我们一开始'Gross und Klein'时，弗莱彻就来了。"


"就是这样，"厄普顿说。对那些认识他的人来说--不是一般的公众，而是戏剧界的人--他的决定性特征是他那不怀好意的笑容。然而，今天，他有一种更清醒的气息。"这是一种阻止你做戏的方式，"他死板地说道。

我们在他们两人作为悉尼剧院公司的联合艺术总监共用的办公室里。如果你最近在屏幕上看到布兰切特比较少，这就是原因所在。除了养育一个年轻的家庭--三个年龄在10岁到3岁之间的儿子之外，自2007年底，当他们从英国搬到这里来时，这份工作就成了布兰切特和厄普顿的生活。

最后，小狗们被私人助理领了出来，我们开始谈正事。这是澳大利亚最大的剧团：它的营业额为3000万澳元（约2000万英镑），每年上演1000多场演出，有30万人走进它的大门。

从莎士比亚和莫里哀到约翰-马尔科维奇和凯文-史派西，相当多的演员已经跳到了经营剧院。布兰切特和厄普顿的前任罗宾-内文长期以来一直是澳大利亚舞台上的常客。但与她不同的是，布兰切特从好莱坞多产的事业高度一跃成为管理层。这是一个戏剧性的转变，对于一个身为年轻父母的女明星来说可能是前所未有的。凯文-史派西没有三个小儿子需要处理。她并没有减少演艺活动：虽然她的电影作品已经稀少，但她一直在悉尼、华盛顿和纽约的舞台上忙碌。今天下午，距离她的最新剧目开演还有一天时间。

"她说："这将会是一件大事。你会知道她的声音；它有一种独特的音色，既深沉又大气。当她说话时，她走来走去，重新系上她的铂金头发，或者当午餐被摆在咖啡桌上时，她转移到地板上坐着。这使我想到一个修正：她的装束并非完全不显眼。当她把脚叠在身下时，她露出了一双镶有闪粉的布洛克鞋。


她本人很有魅力，很认真，明确无误地很聪明。房间很杂乱，墙上挂着纽厄尔-哈里的作品，上面写着："没有必要成为粪便岛的大粪王"。下面，在一个低矮的绿色沙发上，厄普顿敏锐地关注着他妻子给出的答案，有时还插话。有时，他们听起来就像戏剧中的人物：一些稀疏和现代的东西。

"当你说这将是一件事，"厄普顿说，"你的意思是它不会是什么都没有。"

"是的，"布兰切特说。"这就是我的意思。"

他们在说一个事实，"Gross und Klein "不是一个容易上演的剧目。它由柏林剧作家Botho Strauss在20世纪70年代创作，经常被描述为情节性的--意思是故事存在，但有些畏首畏尾。布兰切特认为它是一个追求，她的角色洛特-科特出发 "成为有用的人，做善事，寻找与人的交流"。尽管正如厄普顿所补充的，"它也可能只是一个正在悲伤的女人"。不管怎么说，做这出戏是他们在工作中的第一个想法，他们委托英国剧作家马丁-克里姆普进行新的翻译。在悉尼的演出季结束后，该剧将在欧洲巡演：从3月到6月，它将在伦敦的巴比肯剧院、巴黎的城市剧院、维也纳艺术节和雷克林豪森的鲁尔费斯特比勒剧院演出--因此这部被翻拍的德国戏剧不会逃过德国公众的眼睛。

这是一个大胆的尝试。问题是，它能成功吗？令人吃惊的是，布兰切特和厄普顿都不愿意说这部戏是否好。布兰切特甚至在听到我将参加首演之夜时短暂地泄了气--"我希望你在本周晚些时候来"。从一个拥有五项奥斯卡提名，并因在《飞行者》中扮演凯瑟琳-赫本而将奥斯卡奖带回家的人那里听到这句话是很奇怪的。但这是戏剧，布兰切特，就像记者之夜之前的任何舞台演员一样，不太知道会如何发展。

"这是戏剧的有趣之处，被忽视了，"厄普顿说。"每个人都记得它是现场的，这是一件好事，因为它是现场的，它发生在你眼前，不像电视、YouTube和电影。但是，观众在作品的实际制作过程中的重要性[往往被遗忘]。当观众加入一部作品时，它就开始成为一部戏剧。在那之前，它可能是任何东西，也可能是什么都不是"。他似乎是两个人中比较脆弱的一个，尽管这可能是他的情绪，他后来形容为 "臭气熏天"。

当被问及为什么欧洲的观众应该去看这部由英国和澳大利亚人改编的德国戏剧时，布兰切特的发言很谦虚。"嗯，他们已经很久没有看过了"。

厄普顿则更为宽泛。"这就像把《街车》带到美国，这也是一种狂妄，"他说。(他们在2009年就这么做了。)他本可以补充说，美国人对此没有意见；该剧在华盛顿和纽约都卖光了。相反，他说："我们有可能为它提供一个新的视角"。

我曾以为布兰切特会对出现在悉尼感到放心。她的职业生涯是从这里的舞台开始的，包括在码头的两个舞台中的一个。但家乡的观众可能很难取悦。"看，我们喜欢在这里工作，"她说。"但往往发生的情况是，作品不被重视，直到它有一个国际血统。"


"这是一个澳大利亚的事情，"厄普顿说。"但这不仅仅是澳大利亚的事情。我想每个人都会对陌生人对他们的看法感到紧张。"

凯瑟琳-布兰切特在20世纪90年代中期的某个时候认识了安德鲁-厄普顿。他们俩现在都不记得日期了，尽管布兰切特确实保留了对她后来结婚的那个男人的一个印象。"她说："我真正见到的你身体的第一个部分，"是你的屁股。按照她的说法，当时两人都在一个朋友的家里，帮助拍摄一部短片，而厄普顿把头伸进了烤箱。厄普顿既不确认也不否认这个故事，但他说他们是在1996年的阿德莱德片场 "打成一片"。他们相处得如此之好，在第二年结束前就结婚了。

他们的背景并不相像。厄普顿说是 "死的中产阶级"。布兰切特，1969年出生，在墨尔本的一个艺术装饰风格的郊区长大。"很多隐藏的公共空间，"她说。"我的童年基本上是我在自行车上试图成为特里克西-贝尔登或南希-德鲁，扔下一些我随后会自欺欺人的纸条，把它们当作线索。" 厄普顿出生于1966年，在悉尼郊区长大，有自己的户外活动。他和他的兄弟曾经制作雪橇，并在山上测试，加入煤油以使它们走得更快。

两人的背景都是外来的父亲，都是有出息的人。约翰-厄普顿由他姐姐在德比郡一家酒馆楼上抚养长大，后来成为一名医生。小罗伯特-德威特-布兰切特（Robert DeWitt Blanchett），人称鲍勃（Bob），从德克萨斯州的贫穷开始，首先成为一名水手，然后成为一名成功的广告人。"说实话，我不知道他是如何度过童年的，"布兰切特说。鲍勃没有熬过的是他的中年时期；在凯特10岁时，他死于心脏病发作。从那时起，一切都取决于她的母亲朱恩（June）和她的祖母，后者有大萧条时期的习惯（"不浪费东西"）。她的母亲，布兰切特说，"作为父母是相当具有挑衅性的，总是质疑我对事物的平庸假设"。

这种影响很重要，因为他们成长的澳大利亚知道如何做到平庸。当被问及那个时代时，厄普顿指出A.D.霍普的诗 "澳大利亚"，它描绘了 "一个巨大的寄生虫强盗国家/二手欧洲人在外来海岸的边缘拉扯/恐吓"。他们的学校都有这样的调子--布兰切特毕业于卫理公会女子学院，厄普顿毕业于国王学校，这是该国最古老的文法学校。为了寻求重塑，他们都换了城市。厄普顿去了墨尔本的维多利亚艺术学院，而布兰切特放弃了她在墨尔本大学的经济和美术课程，进入悉尼的国家戏剧艺术学院学习。

到目前为止，和许多20多岁的人一样。接下来的情况发生了变化：在布兰切特登上专业舞台的第一年，评论家们不仅给她颁发了最佳新人奖（在蒂莫西-戴利的音乐剧《卡夫卡之舞》中扮演新娘），而且还颁发了最佳女主角奖（在大卫-马梅特的《奥莱安娜》中扮演学生）。这带来了大量的舞台和银幕角色，然后是她的第一部故事片 "天堂之路"。该片上映的那一年，即1997年，是布兰切特的奇迹之年。她与厄普顿结婚，拍摄了非传统的爱情片《奥斯卡与露辛达》（与拉尔夫-费因斯（Ralph Fiennes）对戏），并被选中出演将推动她获得国际声誉的角色，即谢卡尔-卡普尔（Shekhar Kapur）的《伊丽莎白》中年轻女王的角色。卡普尔得到了她的一部电影，因为他听到人们对 "这个他们在悉尼的舞台上看到的女孩 "赞不绝口。他后来告诉记者，这 "就像我第一次看到《猎鹿人》中的梅丽尔-斯特里普。然后，我说，真是个明星，一个令人着迷的人。"

切换到近十年后，厄普顿和布兰切特与他们的两个儿子住在布莱顿的一个乔治亚风格的房子里。37岁的布兰切特此后出演了二十多部电影。她建立了一个似乎可以让她随心所欲的电影事业。她扮演了一些突出的主角，从她重演的伊丽莎白到《丑闻笔记》中一个非常现代的女人，一个陷入困境的教师，她还因一个配角获得了奥斯卡奖。她对一个好的小角色表现出了敏锐的洞察力，从《天才雷普利先生》中容易受骗的社会名流梅雷迪思到《我不在》中紧张不安的鲍勃-迪伦。即使是错误的角色也很有趣，从《航运新闻》到《生命之水》。她设法在大片中扮演角色--《指环王》三部曲中的精灵女王Galadriel，《夺宝奇兵》和《水晶骷髅王国》中的克格勃恶棍--而不影响她作为一个严肃演员的地位。她像许多女演员一样推广一个护肤品牌，但至少选择了一个有趣的品牌--SK-II。

她通过在悉尼和纽约演出易卜生的《海达-加布勒》来保持她在舞台上的手感--由厄普顿改编。在布兰切特崛起的过程中，他的事业也一直在建设中，以一种幕后的方式。在为戏剧和银幕创作原创作品的同时，他也在改编经典戏剧方面获得了成功。

2006年11月，布兰切特和厄普顿再次来到悉尼，指导一项法案。在码头举行的新闻发布会上，他们宣布他们将留下来，并接手悉尼剧团的运营。这个消息令人惊讶，即使对内部人士来说也是如此（或者说对内部人士来说尤其如此，因为这项工作并没有公布出来）。他们的承诺得到了广泛的赞扬，但也有一些批评。一个头条新闻写道："十步之内的卢维埃"，一位演员科林-穆迪对奥斯卡奖是否是管理一家剧团的充分资格表示怀疑。


还有人把矛头指向厄普顿，指责他骑在妻子的头上。天性自嘲的他不可能去争辩。(他曾对我说："你不会想知道我的情况"。他也被称为 "手"--当他和布兰切特在红地毯上拍照时，他的那部分往往不会被剪掉）。那么，究竟为什么他们会做出颠覆自己的决定？而布兰切特，在她作为演员的巅峰时期，为什么要把自己改造成一个经理呢？

半年过去了，在几十场演出的纪念品和废品的包围下，两人给出了不同的答案，至少在一开始是这样。布兰切特谈到了来自你所生长的国家的灵感，一种创造性的挑战感。"让自己错位，走出你的舒适区，这包括回来，这很重要。"

厄普顿一开始就说这对他们的儿子有好处--天气、熟悉的学校系统--然后转入听起来像是不接受这项工作的理由。"这项工作很辛苦。不是那种擦伤你的指关节或折断你的背的硬，但它仍然是硬的。而我们的观众并不真正在乎，当它归结为它。批评性对话的标准很低。我这么说并不是为了发牢骚。确实如此。"

布兰切特，合理化了。"那是因为在其他地方你会得到七八条评论......重要的是要看你所着手的事情的缺点。"

厄普顿说话的时候把头放在手里，失去了注意力。"但尽管如此，或因为如此，还是有这种创作的冲动。而这又回到了你之前说的那句话。"

抬起头，他看向布兰切特。"这是我们唯一欠下的国家。所以我们回来了。"

"为了响应号召，"布兰切特说。

厄普顿更直截了当。"为了偿还债务。"

在衡量这两人在任期内取得的成绩时，我们不妨从账面上开始。戏剧不是关于利润的，但这个公司依赖于卖票--它从政府资金中获得的预算不到10%。因此，财务状况为剧院座位上的背影提供了一个粗略的指南。首先，由布兰切特本人主演的戏剧有最大的收益。当她在《欲望号街车》中扮演布兰奇-杜波依斯时，由丽芙-乌尔曼（Liv Ullmann）执导，该剧在悉尼和巡回演出中均大获成功，获得270万澳元（约180万英镑）的收入。报纸将这一年的业绩誉为 "街车带动的复苏"。她在下一季主演的《万尼亚舅舅》中与理查德-洛克斯堡和雨果-维文合作的叶莲娜，表现得更好--门票收入几乎达到300万澳元（200万英镑）。布兰切特和厄普顿还努力争取企业赞助商和促进私人遗赠；捐助者包括成为公司赞助人的乔治-阿玛尼和厄普顿学校的老男孩。在经历了四年的亏损之后，公司已经连续两次出现盈余，董事会也将他们的合同延长至2013年底。

如果他们没有成功完成这个角色的核心任务--每年组织一个12个剧目的演出季--就不可能取得这些成果。他们的工作主要是策展，更多的是与想法和合作有关，而不是专注于一个主要节目。而且他们已经能够吸引大牌导演--不仅仅是乌尔曼，还有史蒂文-索德伯格和菲利普-西摩-霍夫曼。"索德伯格在谈到布兰切特时笑着说："她在一个好时机抓住了我。"我对她在《善良的德国人》中的表演非常满意，我倾向于对任何事情都说好。" 当他到达码头时，他喜欢这种氛围："非常合群，非常开放，很有趣"。

这笔钱也为风险较大的戏剧提供了缓冲，如2011年10月首演的《血域》。该剧没有用原住民语言Yolngu的字幕，在首演当晚获得了热烈的掌声。"它不涉及赚钱，"厄普顿说，"它确实涉及与奇怪的订户为敌。"

"凯特和安德鲁已经来到了委托原住民作品的聚会上，"《血域》的作者韦恩-布莱尔说。"他们是风险承担者。我觉得他们在这个国家的戏剧运作方式上有点引领风骚。"

当一个明星成为老板时，不可避免的疑问是他们是否会对细节有很大的胃口。布兰切特通过了测试：她准备向你介绍数字，介绍他们重新调整内部运作的方式，甚至是交通安排--当新南威尔士州前总理克里斯蒂娜-凯尼利告诉她码头将有一条深夜巴士线路时，布兰切特拥抱了她，说这是她一年中得到的最好的消息。

当他们在2006年宣布他们的计划时，布兰切特告诉媒体，"我们是一个团队"。而这一点从看到他们在一起就可以看出。他们与公司员工的合作也很密切；员工们谈起两人时都有一种不经意的亲切感。

厄普顿自己的工作遇到了困难，2008年他的戏剧 "Riflemind "在伦敦失利，并因差评和金融危机而提前关闭。然而，他的改编作品却有着梦幻般的表现--他也执导的《白衣卫士》和他的《万尼亚舅舅》都获得了好评。本-布兰特利（Ben Brantley）在《纽约时报》上写道，他花了三个小时观看该剧，这是他戏剧生涯中最快乐的事情之一。

最激烈的批评来自于舞台之外，布兰切特和厄普顿试图在减少碳排放方面起带头作用。他们 "绿化 "了码头，安装了澳大利亚最大的屋顶太阳能阵列之一，以及水循环和收集系统。这对一座文物建筑来说不是一件容易的事。2011年，布兰切特参与了关于工党政府的碳税计划的辩论，与其他知名人士一起参加了支持这一措施的电视宣传活动。她遭到了鲁珀特-默多克的报纸的讽刺，并在议会中遭到了抨击。"反对党领袖托尼-阿博特（Tony Abbott）说："住在生态豪宅的人有权利发表意见。"但他们的声音不应该在这个国家的普通劳动人民面前被听到。"

乐于为布兰切特的立场辩护的人是工党部长彼得-加勒特。作为摇滚乐队 "Midnight Oil "的前主唱，加勒特知道从艺术家到倡导者的飞跃是什么感觉。"事实上，你可以成为一个一流的演员，"他告诉我，"也可以对我们面前最重要的问题之一有自己的想法和观点。" 他指出，布兰切特在这方面并不是突然出现的。他第一次接触到她是在从事环保运动--1989-93年和1998-2004年分别担任澳大利亚保护基金会的主席。他说，在气候变化方面，"凯特是那些很早就准备好在这个问题上站出来并被算计的人之一。

这一次，布兰切特知道她在做什么。"我碰巧是个演员，"她说。"我碰巧是最容易辨认的面孔，所以是那些想采取消极做法的人最容易的目标。如果你认为这不会发生，你就太天真了。"

批评会让她不再坚持她的脖子吗？现在，一个问题又一次得到了布兰切特的简短回应。一个坚定的 "不"。

"那是媒体的打压"，厄普顿说，"那是遵循一条非常明确的编辑路线。有一条编辑线是好的。可惜的是，其他的编辑线太少了，但这就是生活在这个世界上的感觉。"

开幕之夜是在一个炎热、明亮的日子之后举行的。剧院的黑暗是美味的，正如在舞台上看到的那样，在聚光灯下的长椅上有一杯鸡尾酒。当灯光照到布兰切特身上时，她坐在那里，紧张地听着，似乎在听。"听到了吗？"她说。"外面。两个男人，上上下下地踱步，没完没了。"

她的语气是仓促的，几乎是阴谋论的。观众笑了，她继续说，在第一分钟内又得到了四次笑声，然后是第五次，因为她以狂热的方式去喝酒。喜剧是一个惊喜，尽管它不应该：这是杰弗里-拉什（Geoffrey Rush）曾经称为 "有牙齿的小丑 "的女演员。在这里，她把施特劳斯的洛特扮演成一个迷人的达格，用澳大利亚的术语来说就是一个呆子，在观众还没有感受到任何考验的时候就把他们迷住了。

"我们必须做一些非常棘手的事情，"导演本尼迪克特-安德鲁斯说。"你有800名观众，其中一些人是因为布兰切特而来，被带到这个不寻常的欧洲后现代写作的例子中，但笑着、哭着，一直跟着她走。安德鲁斯在原导演吕克-邦迪（Luc Bondy）退出后，很晚才签约，去做手术。安德鲁斯并不是冷冰冰地走进来的；他是Schaubühne剧院的定期客座导演，该剧院在1978年首次上演 "Gross und Klein"。而且他以前也导演过布兰切特。他说："她是我在演员中遇到的最能表达自己情感的人，"他说。在排练中，她 "总是在脚尖上，总是非常警觉"--而且通常是最后一个离开的演员。安德鲁斯上一次指导布兰切特是在2009年，她在莎士比亚历史剧的混搭中扮演理查德二世--"有很多其他国王需要关注"。这一次，是布兰切特要带着观众，而她确实做到了。


"她和我见过的任何人一样好，"史蒂文-索德伯格说，"我见过很多人。" 他记得在《好德国人》片场的一个时刻，他要求她的一句话不是作为观察而是作为指责。"那简直是我能想到的唯一一个我说'往这边倾斜'的例子，"他补充说。"她完全理解了这一点。"

厄普顿说他有多喜欢 "Gross und Klein "的物理性，喜欢安德鲁斯所做的大量运动。这是一个很好的决定，因为布兰切特是一个了不起的移动者。这肯定是马丁-斯科塞斯让她扮演凯瑟琳-赫本的原因，她是一个从小骑马、摔跤和打高尔夫的女人。在 "Gross und Klein "中，布兰切特有时会做滑稽动作和糟糕的舞蹈。在其他时刻，她的动作像一个悲伤的哑剧。总的来说，这是一次成功的巡演。

三天和三场演出之后，布兰切特和厄普顿在他们固定的午餐地点，即码头后面的一家咖啡馆。这是一个不伦不类的星期二的中午。作为一个普通人，布兰切特与女服务员闲聊。除了一个路过的同事对周六晚上的表演表示祝贺外，没有其他人注意到。"哦，你来了，"布兰切特说，听起来很感激。今天，她和厄普顿都有点消沉。他们的小儿子Iggy今天早上四点就把他们叫起来了，而且是在一个演出之夜的背景下。

"这不是一个非常适合年轻家庭的工作，"布兰切特说。他们通过交替担任父母的工作来实现这一目标。"我认为最终的代价不是孩子，因为他们总是有我们中的一个。而是我们不经常看到对方，除非我们在绿屋里。

另一个牺牲是在电影方面。"她说："我还没有真正能够拍摄任何电影。我说，她已经拍了一些--"我可以拍'汉娜'（一部欧洲惊悚片），因为他们可以把我挤到学校假期的三个星期里，而且我们有一些关系，我们想在柏林建立和培养。所以她仍然在做白天的工作。"然后冰岛的火山爆发了，我得到了一个额外的星期。但这其实是不可能的。这很复杂，因为我致力于在舞台上表演，而且每年至少做一次，这意味着在非常平凡的层面上，有六个星期不把孩子们放在床上，所以那时我并不真的想去拍另一部电影。"

从38岁到42岁，她的电影作品大多是客串。当被问及她是否为让角色过去而感到难过时，布兰切特的回答听起来像是肯定，又像是否定。"你非常敏锐地意识到你只有一次生命，但也许我只是在意识到这一点上比较迟钝。"

厄普顿则说他只是刚刚掌握了这个事实。在剧团工作，他没有时间写新戏。那么，当他完成工作后，他将写什么呢？"他笑着说："除了开幕式上的发言卡以外的东西。当他和布兰切特谈到未来时，他们都很兴奋。突然间，他们的想法开始活跃起来：他们想做的事情，他们想在码头看到的事情，从加强与亚洲的接触到他们家门口的城市改造--对于一个故事来说太多了。"再写一个！" 布兰切特说。她是个热心人，真的。"你做这一切，你认为--你希望--这真的很重要。"

在咖啡馆，午餐已经完成，前面是一下午的会议，然后是下一场演出。"但是你知道，昨天下午我带孩子们去了Woop-Woop的一个购物中心"--澳大利亚语的Nowheresville--"在那里他们通常会说，'你看起来像那个女演员'。或者'我喜欢你演的《泰坦尼克号》'。昨天一个女人说，'你在悉尼做什么？''我住在这里，'我说。'我经营悉尼剧院公司'。'哦，是吗？"

布兰切特在说这句话时，强调了 "做 "的意思，语气升高，巧妙地抓住了购物者的惊讶。然后，看了一眼厄普顿，她又恢复了自己。"但是，"她说，"我们喜欢它。"

逃脱的角色
如果凯特-布兰切特在过去的几年里能有更多的机会出场，她可能会得到哪些角色，比如上面的那个？大卫-汤姆森推测

既然我们谈论的是一位伟大的女演员，她肯定会被考虑出演过去几年中最好的女性角色--电视剧《国土安全》中的Carrie Mathison。她是一个两极化的中情局狂热分子，她认为一个刚从伊拉克监禁回来的美国士兵可能已经被基地组织策反。于是她与他走得很近，并与他发生了婚外情。但我们现在知道这部分是如此之好，因为克莱尔-丹尼斯在里面是惊人的。有谁在悬疑片的驾驶舱里演过一个更聪明、更感性、更不安的女人？凯特-布兰切特会欣喜若狂，神经紧绷，但丹尼斯通过这样的惊喜超越了这一点。

蒂尔达-斯文顿在林恩-拉姆塞的《我们需要谈谈凯文》中扮演一个青少年连环杀手的母亲，她的表现非常出色。没有人乐于与蒂尔达较量。但是，如果你事先看过小说或剧本，并被问及你认为谁适合演这个角色，凯特-布兰切特将是一个明显的答案。而且她和斯文顿有一个共同点：他们可以从豪华到垃圾，从聪明到愚蠢，轻松地进行。

如果我是拉斯-冯-提尔（还好我不是），我对 "忧郁症 "唯一犹豫不决的地方是给布兰切特提供哪个角色--抑郁症患者（由获得戛纳电影节表演奖的克尔斯滕-邓斯特扮演）或另一个为世界末日担忧的妹妹（由夏洛特-甘斯布扮演）的惊愕。凯特可以扮演任何一个角色--她可以同时扮演这两个角色。假设这对姐妹是双胞胎。现在，我第一次想知道我是否不介意成为拉斯-冯-提尔，想办法让布兰切特既狂躁又抑郁。

当你玩这个游戏时，你的想法每一步都会变得更疯狂。让布兰切特扮演 "有龙纹的40岁女人 "如何？毕竟，没有人能够阻止利斯贝斯-萨兰德，所以有一天她会变成40岁，而且同样强悍。布兰切特可能需要在健身房呆上三个月才能做好准备，但她身上的纹身会让人眼前一亮，而且我们知道她可以做到疏远、无礼和别惹我：《伊丽莎白》、《维罗妮卡-格林》和《失踪》中就有证据。任何40多岁的女演员都会跃跃欲试，在这个年龄段塑造萨兰德，并能骑上摩托车。梅丽尔-斯特里普（Meryl Streep）可以扮演她的纹身师，马克斯-冯-西多夫（Max von Sydow）则扮演记者米卡尔-布隆维斯特（Mikael Blomkvist）。

请记住，布兰切特已经在《我不在》中扮演过鲍勃-迪伦，以及在澳大利亚舞台上扮演过《理查德二世》。因此，让她在《工匠、裁缝、士兵、间谍》中扮演乔治-斯迈利是合乎逻辑的下一步。我们不是一直知道军情五处的一些人并不像他们看起来那样吗？那么，一个变性人怎么样？这将解释为什么安-斯迈利对 "乔治 "如此厌烦。你难道看不到凯特戴着角质眼镜，剪着公务员的发型，以及加里-奥德曼从亚历克-吉尼斯那里学到的那种干巴巴的无动于衷的样子吗？这种偏离中心的观点正是勒卡雷的男子俱乐部所需要的。而就这一次，斯迈利可以笑了。

摄影：Steve Forrest