Key Points
Cate Blanchett declared that the #MeToo movement “got killed very quickly.”
The actress previously led a protest at the Cannes Film Festival.
Blanchett said it’s “boring” to work on a film set and realize how few women there are compared to men.
Eight years after leading a women’s march at the Cannes Film Festival, Cate Blanchett returned to the South of France to declare that #MeToo “got killed very quickly.”
The two-time Oscar winner took part in a conversation at the 2026 edition of the festival with Didier Allouch on May 17, and she spoke about what she perceives as an abrupt end to the social movement that gained momentum in 2017 in the wake of the accusations against Harvey Weinstein.
“There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say this has happened to me, and the so-called average woman on the street is saying, ‘Me Too.’ Why does that get shut down?” Blanchett asked, as reported by Variety. “What [the movement] revealed is a systemic layer of abuse, not only in this industry but in all industries, and if you don’t identify a problem, you can’t solve the problem.”
In 2018, at the first Cannes after Weinstein’s sexual crimes were publicized, Blanchett served as the festival’s jury president. Alongside Kristen Stewart, Ava DuVernay, and 79 other women of film, Blanchett walked up the steps of the Palais des Festivals to protest gender inequality. She called out the stark difference in male and female directors in the history of Cannes, noting that, at that point, there were 1,866 male filmmakers, compared to 82 women.
“We expect our institutions to actively provide parity and transparency in their executive bodies and provide safe environments in which to work,” Blanchett said in a speech at the time. “We expect our governments to make sure that the laws of equal pay for equal work are upheld. We demand that our workplaces are diverse and equitable so that they can best reflect the world in which we actually live — a world that allows all of us in front and behind the camera, all of us to thrive shoulder to shoulder with our male colleagues.”
She added, “We acknowledge all of the women and men around the world who are standing for change. The stairs of our industry must be accessible to all. Let’s climb.”
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Fast-forward eight years, and Blanchett is lamenting the lack of progress within the industry.
“I’m still on film sets, and I do the headcount every day, and there’s 10 women and there’s 75 men every morning,” she said. “I love men, but what happens is the jokes become the same. You just have to brace yourself slightly, and I’m used to that, but it just gets boring for everybody when you walk into a homogeneous workplace. I think it has an effect on the work.”
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