“Why Is It There?”: How a Cat Became Integral to Cate Blanchett’s ‘Disclaimer’ Performance

Cate Blanchett ‘s Disclaimer role turned out to be much more than an epic performance of a celebrated documentarian watching her life fall apart: She learned to debone a fish and tame cats, too.

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It turns out, in Alfonso Cuarón’s AppleTV+ thriller , the animal friends of Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen’s characters are integral to the show’s layered symbolism. The cast — including Blanchett, Baron Cohen, Kevin Kline, Louis Partridge, Leila George and HoYeon Jung — spoke to audiences after a BFI London Film Festival screening of the program’s first three episodes Thursday.

The seven-part series follows the acclaimed creative Catherine Ravenscroft (Blanchett) and her wealthy husband Robert (Baron Cohen), whose lives are turned upside down when a book named The Perfect Stranger is posted to Catherine and — to her horror — divulges a secret of hers that she hoped had been long buried. At the same time, the couple are distracted by a directionless son Nicholas (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The widower teacher who published the book (Kline), seeking revenge following the death of his son Jonathon (Partridge), basks smugly in the light of the fire he has lit in Catherine’s life.

It is hard not to notice the performances of some secondary, nonhuman characters, too — the Ravenscrofts’ cat, who regularly leaps in and out of shot at the elegant London home of Disclaimer ‘s central couple. In one crucial scene, as Blanchett’s character is deboning some sole, we see her trying to wrangle the misbehaved cat who is intent on making her life harder.

It might seem innocuous — but Cuarón was very purposeful about the cat, and Blanchett soon came to understand its importance in the show.

“[I was like], why is the cat there? And then I realized,” Blanchett began. “I think it was in the shot where I had to debone a fish — I was given the deboning fish lessons. My family ate quite a lot of fish during this shoot…. But then, just when I got the deboning right, when we had done a few takes, [Cuarón] is like, ‘Put the cat in.'”

“By introducing an animal,” she turned to her director as she spoke, “exactly what you were saying is you can’t control it. There’s something wicked in your desire…. We think we need to control all of our lives, when, in fact, we are so monumentally out of control. And everyone, we’re so out of control in the world at the moment, and then you introduce an animal into these really controlled environments, and you have organized chaos all the time.”

“I thought that was a really interesting, really subtle way of watching these people constantly [in chaos].”

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Cuarón half-joked: “It was incredible to see Cate suffering. Taking the cat away, cooking, but never missing a beat in terms of her character to perform the way that the character would be doing it. For me, it was a pleasure.”

He continued: “I have to say, Cate broke the cat. The cat ended up doing whatever Cate wanted. The animal trainer was very upset because he said: ‘It took me three years to teach this cat to go from A to B, and now the cat does do whatever it wants to do.'” Blanchett then clarified she is an animal lover at home, revealing she owns two cats, four dogs and six chickens.

As always, Cuarón and Blanchett took the opportunity to gush over one another’s genius, with the former saying: “The involvement of Cate as an executive was…we often see many credits that are cosmetic. And Cate was not. She was involved in every single casting decision, every single moment.”

The cast were full of praise for the Roma and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban director. “Often you feel like you have to take a leap of faith when you’re working with people,” Partridge said. “So yeah, [his] vote of confidence and just seeing how meticulous you are with everything…. It’s a luxury that isn’t afforded on every job.”

That word — meticulous — came up a lot when the actors were referring to Cuarón’s creative approach. “You’ll see when you get to the end of the show,” Blanchett added, “that Alfonso is absolutely meticulous and had a very clear vision.”

Disclaimer premieres on AppleTV+ on Oct. 11.

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