Cate Blanchett Unpacks ‘Disclaimer’ Finale Reveal: “The Truth Was Hiding in Plain Sight”
[This story contains major spoilers from the season finale of Disclaimer.]
Cate Blanchett says it was an enormous relief when she finally filmed the finale of her Apple series Disclaimer.
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“To finally have given voice to that trauma, to be able to tell the story in its entirety,” she says, was so monumental that she actually felt a physical reaction. “I didn’t realize how tense I was for six months until we finally filmed the confrontation scene with Kevin [Kline] where I could finally speak.”
Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft is finally given the space to tell her story in that finale scene, and the one that she tells reframes everything the characters in the Alfonso Cuarón miniseries thought they knew. The flip on the show’s narrative also forces the audience to confront their own judgments made across the seven-episode series.
Up until that scene, Catherine, an acclaimed journalist, had been vilified and essentially canceled after a novel, called The Perfect Stranger, arrived out of the blue to out her for a past affair with a 19-year-old named Jonathan (played by Louis Partridge) who tragically drowned after saving Catherine’s young son, aged 4 at the time. According to the book, Catherine (played in flashback by Leila George), saw Jonathan struggling in the water but made no effort to signal for help.
When Catherine finally sits down across the kitchen table from Kline’s Stephen — the father of Jonathan whose late wife Nancy (Lesley Manville) penned The Perfect Stranger — Blanchett’s character reveals for the first time in her life the brutal sexual assault that she survived the night before by Jonathan, who was in reality a disturbed, young man and nothing like the romanticized version his mother, now revealed to be an unreliable narrator, had written in the book. Catherine explains, in harrowing detail, the relief she then felt when fate took its course that next day while she was on vacation with her son in Italy. Because with Jonathan’s happenstance death, she could bury the trauma that she was now reliving unwillingly, due to Stephen’s relentless and misguided pursuit of vengeance.
After that 30-something-page monologue, Blanchett tells The Hollywood Reporter she felt lighter. The intent of the revelation, she says, was not to trick the audience. “The truth, as is so often, has been hiding in plain sight,” says Blanchett. “And the way in which we avoid acknowledging it reveals a lot about who we are. So it was to allow the audience to confront perhaps the way they absorb narratives or information or stories … and that they can sit comfortably uncomfortable in those unexamined prejudicial points of view that I guess we all naturally have.”
Below, Blanchett unpacks more from the ending, including the finale scene she says is the coda of the whole series between her and her onscreen husband Sacha Baron Cohen (“A quiet resolution,” she calls it); how she feels about the accusatory questions often leveled at sexual assault survivors about speaking out; and how she imagines her character and her son (played by Kodi Smit-McPHee) can now profoundly heal in the closed book of Disclaimer.
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I understand the road to Disclaimer was a long one for writer-director Alfonso Cuarón. He first read Renée Knight’s 2015 novel before making Roma (2018) but then began working on the adaptation as a series after Roma. At what point did you come in?
It was pre-COVID, or during COVID. He had written a polished draft of all of the episodes. And he didn’t want to discuss it before I’d read it. He didn’t want to influence my read at all. But I came in at that point, and he wasn’t sure where he was going to set it up, and ultimately it was with Apple.
He told me in our interview that making this show was a two-hander and that you were involved in every aspect including from the beginning rewrites. What were some of the biggest changes made in the series?
It was very sort of organic, the conversations and the way Alfonso invited me to work with him on Disclaimer. So, it just evolved. Obviously, he had a very clear vision for what he wanted to make. But he was alive to perspective shifts that would come about as the truth was revealed about what was going on inside Catherine. And given that she had been absent from the narrative, or that the narrative had been highjacked by other characters’ perspectives, we talked about how that might have changed the way that was visually realized. So it was very much about honing those perspectives. But when you work with Alfonso Cuarón on that stuff, and Chivo [Emmanuel Lubezki, cinematographer], who was shooting my character’s point of view, it’s a privilege and a joy.
Alfonso said something that was very important to you was that if people watch this show a second time, it would be a totally different show: It would be watching a woman trying to speak, and no one is letting her. What was it like playing that out as Catherine in the episodes leading up to the finale, before she she finally tells her story?
I felt very strongly, as did Alfonso, that we didn’t want to trick the audience. That the truth, as is so often, is hiding in plain sight. And the way in which we avoid acknowledging it reveals a lot about who we are. So it was to allow the audience to confront perhaps the way they absorb narratives or information or stories, or whether they like or dislike the actions of a character that they’re watching and who they naturally would side with, and that they can sit comfortably uncomfortable in those unexamined prejudicial points of view that I guess we all naturally have. If they were to go back and watch a second time, they might be able to see, rather than someone who is not speaking and who is accused of lying, that perhaps she wasn’t given the chance to speak.
There are many, many infinite reasons why people stay silent. From my character’s perspective, it’s her controlling her grief and rage and not wanting to be retraumatized. As a survivor of sexual assault, she can’t do all the work. She’s already survived the experience and tried as best she could to move forward. Her boundaries have already been crossed. And I think perhaps we might see what happens when it’s made harder for someone to be heard, and to risk them being retraumatized and reexperiencing an event that has been hard enough to move through already. It takes a lot of energy to hide one’s feelings, so I didn’t realize how tense I was for six months until we finally filmed the confrontation scene with Kevin [Kline] where I could finally speak.
A couple of days before, because it was the culmination of so much that had gone prior, I said to Alfonso that we should probably just film it as one long monologue. A 30-page monologue, and he could pick and choose which parts he wanted to have onscreen and which parts he wanted to have in flashback. But it was an enormous relief to finally have given voice to that trauma, to be able to tell the story in its entirety. Because at first, I think you could look at this scene and say it’s slightly heightened, would the story unfold like this? But I think because my character had not been in charge of the way the narrative had unfolded, it was really important to speak the story out and rewrite the perspectives on that history that was actually hers, but that no one had bothered to shine a light on.
That kitchen confrontation with Kevin Kline was a 30-page monologue for you?
I can’t remember. It was a very, very long scene. It obviously happens in that particular chapter [in the book], but some of it was written in voiceover. If you go back and watch it again, there’s a whole soundscape that goes underneath that tells you what reality you are in. Alfonso didn’t want it to seem like voiceover, he wanted it to all come out as if the story was being told. And I said, “Well, let’s just shoot it then.” So it read like it was in voiceover, but then I think he ended up putting a lot more of it in the room rather than [flashing] back [to the vacation where it happened] in Italy.
And it was a tricky balance because some of those things are played in flashback and the audience has to recalibrate what they’ve accepted as being reality. At the same time, they’re hearing the genuine, true, completing perspective that rounds out what actually happened. Because, of course, the truth is a complex thing, and it’s made up of many different points of view. We often lean into one predigested point of view that’s easy to swallow and that doesn’t make us feel uncomfortable, one that we’ve seen before. And you’re asking the audience to reassess that and lean into one that perhaps makes them feel uncomfortable.
How long did that scene take to film?
A heartbeat? A week? Six months? (Laughs) I really did lose a sense of time on this one because, in fact, the whole series takes place in a very short period of time, but it’s playing with memory. When you’re traumatized and retraumatized as my character is, time collapses. You can be lost in a memory in two seconds and feel like you’ve been back there for two days. I think we shot it for a week because there was a lot of stuff outside, and there were a lot of lighting shifts and moving in and out, and we tried it lots of different ways and there were many setups. I think it was five days.
Since you said you were so tense leading up to that scene, did you have a physical reaction when Alfonso called, “Cut”?
I felt profoundly light. I came back in, and we were just going to clean the scene up, we had bits and pieces to do. And then I saw the camera was pointing to me. He said we have to do another shot. I said I thought we’d finished. So then I had to leave set to give myself five minutes and go, “OK, there’s more to do.” I think it was in that moment when I realized we weren’t finished that I realized how tense I was.
In the finale, we as viewers are confronting our own judgments made about your character thus far. What is Disclaimer saying about the vilification of women, about mothers, about society?
Well, my job was to deal with the consequences of living with a traumatic experience and having to unpack that and digest that and bury that alone. That was my job as an actor. But collaborating with Alfonso, there’s a meta-concern at work. Without wanting to be too pretentious, currently in the world there is an absolute war that I don’t think has been much discussed, and that is the war of narratives with this battle for a singular truth. Hopefully, the series allows you to see that there are many points of view, and it’s not always the point of view that’s being sung the loudest that is the most true. And it can bury and obscure more fragile but equally powerful and valid perspectives, and that is of course my character.
I did think a lot about the cost of women when they’re always asked, “Why didn’t you speak up earlier? Why didn’t you report this?” I felt a big responsibility to actually give voice to that, because they are, unfortunately, still questions leveled at women who don’t report sexual assault for many years after, and it’s leveled at them to somehow invalidate the fact that it happened to them. So I thought that was really important. And also the scene at the hospital with Robert [Sacha Baron Cohen] at the end where he goes, “Why didn’t you tell me?” I thought that was a very, very important coda of a scene on the series.
Alfonso called that scene between Catherine and Robert the thesis of the show. Catherine voices that her husband seemed almost relieved that she was raped, rather than the idea that she cheated on him. Why was It important that Catherine leave Robert in the end?
It wasn’t so much leaving Robert, that seems secondary and somehow about him when it was about her. Sometimes the accusation that can be leveled is that reporting these things is about retribution. And it wasn’t about that. It was about her being whole. It’s not about her being able to be trustworthy; it’s about her ability to trust, and her ability to trust him was profoundly broken. It was a quiet resolution. It wasn’t a resolution where she was trying to change the world or shift what happened to her. Because the other thing is that the wonderful, wonderful Kodi Smit-McPHee, who played my son, he too has been traumatized. But he’s in a state where, because he was too young, he cannot consciously remember what happened. But we the audience have seen the consequences of that trauma on him and on his relationship with his mother.
As the mother of sons, that scene with him… We don’t have a lot of screen time together, because the series thrusts you right into the present drama. So the past drama between them that has left them estranged, because they are both victims of violence with him bearing witness to [her sexual assault], I thought that was also another important moment to express that just because someone can’t consciously remember something doesn’t mean you’re not alive, that something terrible has happened.
How do you imagine Catherine’s life after the screen fades to black since Disclaimer is indeed a limited series?
Rather than the actual events that she may set into action or things that may change in her life, I’ve thought about the feeling of profound relief, of not having to hide from herself anymore. And the gap that had been filled with the energy required to keep a lid on what had happened to her for the sake of other people that she was able to now fill with a different type of meaning that was more fulfilling. So perhaps there’s a lightness of spirit. I don’t think you can go back and erase what happened to you. The only option is to move forward, but to move forward with a greater sense of cohesion and also, clearly, the relationship with her son is able to profoundly heal. They’re able to be there for one another in a way they couldn’t before because they hadn’t meshed their experiences of trauma; they weren’t interwoven. So that connection will enable, hopefully, those bonds to repair and to move forward in a more positive direction.
What were your collaborations with Leila George about playing the two portrayals of Catherine?
[We didn’t really collaborate] because Leila was playing a fictitious version of the character, one written by Nancy [Lesley Manville]. And so she was totally free to do anything because it didn’t have anything to do with my character. She was a construct. In a way, I didn’t want to know what that was, because it was existing in parallel.
Alfonso said he doesn’t know if he’ll do TV again so soon because it took so long to film, that he’d like to cleanse his palate with a film. Do you want to collaborate with him again, and would you do more TV?
(Laughs) With Alfonso, definitely. And, it depends on the story. There was a conversation at one point about, why not make Disclaimer as a film? And I think he wanted to risk an audience feeling sort of turned on by things that are perhaps repugnant; and he wanted time for people to sit with their judgments, their points of views, their likes and dislikes. And that required time and the chapterization of the narrative and couldn’t be done in a film. So likewise, if a story came my way that I felt could benefit from the amount of time that serialized storytelling can give it then, yeah. But I suppose it just depends.
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Disclaimer is now streaming all episodes on Apple TV+.
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