I totally thought that Interview Magazine had folded at some point, but here’s a new issue. Cate Blanchett covers the March issue to promote Where Did You Go Bernadette, the film adaptation of the popular book (the film looks bad though). Interview Mag’s thing is to get famous people to interview other famous people, which is how we got Julia Friggin’ Roberts interviewing Cate. I would have thought that Julia would be much too alpha for this, but maybe she thinks of Cate as her equal. They’re friendly enough in the interview, although Julia does try to one-up her a few times. Cate doesn’t bite. You can read the full piece here. Some highlights:

Cate thinks about quitting acting: “I’ve just had a half-bottle of red after a rather challenging day of rehearsal for a play I’m doing at the National Theatre [When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other]. As you get older, acting just gets more and more humiliating. When I was younger, I would wonder why the older actors I admired kept talking about quitting. Now I realize it’s because they want to maintain a connection to the last shreds of their sanity. As I get older, I ask myself if I still want to submit myself to the shamanistic end of this profession and go completely into madness. It’s the King Lear end of the spectrum of what we do, right? So I’m on the proverbial couch thinking, “Do I want to go that direction, or do I actually want to live a life?”

Whether it’s time for her to retire: “No, but it really is. I have to go onstage in my underwear yet again, and I’m thinking, “Why? Why don’t I just feed the chickens and read Proust?” It’s on my bookshelf staring at me right now. All these volumes I have purchased and not yet read. Why have I not picked those up? Why am I still bothering to make movies?

On her plot to make her kids vegetarian: “I’m quite happy sitting here looking at my unread Proust, talking to you and feeding my pigs. I was a vegetarian for years when my husband wanted to get pigs. I said, “I’ll get pigs as long as we tell the kids that the sausages and bacon they eat are from our pigs.” We called them Benson and Hedges. It was this Machiavellian vegetarian plan that I had for my kids, that they would form this deep connection with the piglets, which were very cute and smelled kind of like smelly people. And then I would tell them that if we eat sausages, they’re coming from these pigs. The kids were just totally fine with that and I was horrified. My plan to turn my family vegetarian was a monumental failure.”

Why she turns down certain roles: “When I feel like it’s a pre-masticated version of something I’ve already done? Like a margarine commercial, where the agency thinks, “This worked before, so, hey, let’s do it again!” After I played Queen Elizabeth, I got offered myriad roles that were basically the same story with a different costume. There was no potential for discovering anything new. There’s no risk.

[From Interview]

I sort of love her vegetarian plot and how it blew up in her face. Some kids are just like that, they accept that some animals are for food and even if the animals have names, kids are like “but bacon is good.” I could eat some Benson and Hedges right now, sorry not sorry. As for whether she should quit… I always find it remarkable to see how much she actually works. We don’t always “see” it because she does so much stage work (as a director/producer and actress), but seriously, she works all the time.

Cover courtesy of Interview, additional photos courtesy of WENN.