Cate Blanchett Thinks Hollywood Does A Terrible Job Portraying Mothers

Cate Blanchett has played a mom at home and on the silver screen, but the actress said she thinks both Hollywood and society as a whole have a lot of work to do smashing stereotypes about mothers.

The mother to three boys — ages 12, 10, and 5 — Blanchett plays a mother in her latest film, How to Train Your Dragon 2. The 45-year-old actress voices Valka, a mother reunited with her heroic son after she had abandoned him in his youth.

Cate Blanchett said the movie does a good job nailing the role of mothers, something that Hollywood as a whole has struggled to accomplish.

“When anyone plays a mother on film, there is a whole raft of judgment in that a mother is a particular archetype or that every mother is the same,” Blanchett said, via The Telegraph. “That’s complete rubbish. We did discuss a lot about that particular issue because of course there is a judgment on how women parent. The film actually deals with it really beautifully and deeply and emotionally.”

Blanchett added that society has a double standard when it comes to women.

“It’s a certainly a question that’s never asked of men. The question is only ever directed towards of women — How do you balance? How do you have it all?”

Cate Blanchett has been open about gender roles in the past, calling out a cameraman at the Cannes Film Festival for panning the camera from head to toe on her, but not doing the same for male celebrities.

“It’s a little bit rude to look a woman up and down like that, and when a camera does it, it’s a bit annoying,” she said.

But that kind of candor is nothing new for Blanchett, who said she never conformed to traditional ideas of what a woman should do or say.

“I always dressed as a man when I was at school,” she said in an interview last year with The Herald. “I loved wearing a tie and a shirt, and I was always wearing suits. Annie Lennox was my hero. I was always playing men in high school.”

Though the issue is important to her, Cate Blanchett still has a bit of fun when talking about it. During interviews for the premiere How To Train Your Dragon 2, she joked with a reporter who accidentally called her Mr. Blanchett and told another reporter that she spends time every day showing affection to her babies — her two Oscar statues.