“Nightmare Alley” director Guillermo del Toro had quite the compliment for Cate Blanchett.
The actress recently chatted to SiriusXM’s Julia Cunningham and Jess Cagle, who mentioned an upcoming version of “Pinocchio” the actor was doing with del Toro.
Blanchett said, “I am playing Sprezzatura, the monkey. And I don’t know how it came about really. I think we were on set one day and I said, ‘When are we gonna work together again?’ And he said, ‘I’m doing Pinocchio’.
“And he [gasped.] He’d said to me the day before that, ‘You are not this mysterious woman. You are a really cheeky, naughty 12-year-old boy.’ And so he said, ‘Why don’t you play the monkey?’ I dunno. I don’t have any words. I just make monkey noises for two hours. So yeah, that was fun.”
Blanchett also spoke about her role as Dr. Lilith Ritter in “Nightmare Alley”, playing alongside Bradley Cooper’s Stanton Carlisle.
The star shared of the movie, “I play a psychiatrist who is interested in the life of the mind, the power of the mind, the recesses of the mind, and the hidden truths that none of us wanna look at, the dangerous recesses of the mind. And the story is ostensibly about a con man played by Bradley Cooper, who learns through the carnies and through the circus life about mind-reading as a trick, as a way to earn a quick buck.
“And he then gets very good at this, with Rooney Mara’s character in tow, and he goes into the corridors of power where he meets my character and thinks that he can actually earn an enormous amount of money by tricking those in power to give him what he thinks will take him to the next level.
“And they find one another and in almost like a dance of death, it’s a strange sort of epically Greek relationship that Bradley’s character and my character has that she starts to psychoanalyze him to see if he is strong enough to deal with the truth of who he really is. And I think that that is something that is timeless. And so I found most of the time, my character had Bradley’s character on the couch, which was fascinating.”
Revealing there was one part of Cooper that she’s a huge fan of, Blanchett gushed, “He has very long eyelashes, which is what you get to see as a psychoanalyst, as you look down and see how long the eyelashes are. He has lovely eyelashes, Bradley. He’s a wonderful actor, but his eyelashes are so divine. That’s why I took the job.
“It was very intense, and all of my stuff was shot in a block. I mean, obviously there’s an amazing ensemble cast that Guillermo has attracted. I mean, he is an actor magnet, Guillermo. He loves performers and he loves everything that they can bring and loves being surprised by them. So he’s just so wonderful to work with. So there was a whole other side of the movie that I wasn’t part of but I had this very intense period with Bradley locked inside my character’s psychiatry office.”
