‘Disclaimer’ Star Cate Blanchett Is Happy Viewers Probably Won’t Like Her Character
In Alfonso Cuarón’s seven-part Apple TV+ limited series “Disclaimer,” Cate Blanchett plays Catherine Ravenscroft, an accomplished and award-winning documentary filmmaker whose life is upended when a book is published based on a fictionalized version of a difficult event from her past.
But one of the points of “Disclaimer” is that viewers themselves are also upended, as the Oscar-winning, Mexican-born director of “Children of Men,” “Gravity” and “Roma” juggles present-day scenes with flashbacks, allowing viewers to discover the relationships between characters on their own. The story also shifts between a first person, second person and third person perspective depending on what character is on the screen.
It’s an approach that requires viewers to untangle a lot of narrative threads as they follow Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen as the adult Catherine and Robert Ravenscroft, Leila George and Adam El Hagar as their younger versions and Kevin Kline and Lesley Manville as Stephen and Nancy Brigstocke, whose son Jonathan died after encountering Catherine on a holiday decades earlier.
And for Blanchett, who also served as an executive producer on the series, it’s an approach that allows her to be tight-lipped and uncommunicative for much of the six-hour-plus running time. Catherine isn’t very talkative or likable, and Cuarón and Blanchett only spill her secrets reluctantly and slowly.
“If this was a more standardized version of serialized storytelling, you would get to know the character,” Blanchett told TheWrap. “You would build bridges of empathy between the character and the audience.”
“Disclaimer,” though, isn’t terribly interested in empathy, at least not for the woman at the center of the turmoil. “In this, we are thrust into the middle of a crisis that no one fully understands,” she said with a grin. “You don’t get a chance as an audience to understand the character, and as an actor you don’t have to try to be likable.”
“Usually, you would make the character likable from the beginning, and then you’d see the journey,” added Cuarón, who said that Blanchett attacked the script with “a magnifying glass and a sledgehammer” looking for inconsistencies and making suggestions. “Cate had to use her physicality to express so many clues about who the character really is and what’s beneath that. I don’t know how she did it.”
Blanchett isn’t exactly sure, either. “The way the story was being told was quite tricky, but I love a challenge,” she said. “In a way, I had to play a tall glass of water. The tricky thing was to withhold information from the audience about who the person was — not in some manipulative way, but to play someone who had a wealth of hidden experiences buried deep within her. And to allow that to sit there, and sometimes to bubble up.
“It was quite tricky playing a character who didn’t speak her truth, to use that very strange contemporary American expression.”
She shook her head. “Your truth. I always thought, in a very Greek way, that the truth was an immutable thing. But I think what we are coming to realize is that getting to the truth of someone or getting to the truth of an event is a very messy and complicated process that’s made up from a myriad of different perspectives in a way that speaks to the identity of a person.
“And your identity is not a static thing. You are different things to different people,” Blanchett added. “I thought about the character in relation to the circumstance that she found herself in. And with a lot of events that happen to us, we either forget them, or we bury them or ignore them or polish them up and make them into little treasures that very quickly don’t resemble anything at all of the actual event.”
“Disclaimer” circles around the event at the heart of its narrative, returning to it from different perspectives and offering different versions all the way to the finale. “I think there’s a form that tends to calcify around serialized storytelling,” she said. “You have the cliffhangers, you have character arcs developed in a certain way. And Alfonso said, in the best, most open way possible, ‘I don’t know how to make television.’ And I never felt that that’s what we were making. It was a genuine investigation in seeing what would happen.”
Cuarón didn’t look at it as a TV series, either; he premiered the film at the Venice Film Festival and also played the Toronto and London festivals before its two-episode Apple TV+ debut on Friday. At those festivals, it played in its entirety, with the first four episodes playing in one program and the last three in another.
“It’s a film in chapters,” he said. “But in television and in film, I think that there’s an over-reliance on exposition. They have to explain every single thing and don’t allow the audience to put two and two together, and maybe make their own story as they’re watching. I just wanted to trust the form.”
New episodes of “Disclaimer” drop Fridays on Apple TV+.
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