Cate Blanchett Might Have More Time to Hate on Leaf Blowers Soon

Perhaps it’s been tiring juggling her acting career on top of all the time and energy she dedicates to being a professional hater? In a recent Radio Times interview, renowned leaf blower loather Cate Blanchett suggested that she has plans to stop being an actress. “My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it. I am serious about giving up acting,” she said. “[There are] a lot of things I want to do with my life.” Blanchett — who has won two Oscars, four BAFTAs, four Golden Globe awards, and three SAG awards — would definitely have a lot more free time if she quits. For reference, she made the remarks about her potential retirement while promoting her upcoming first radio play, an adaptation of Wallace Shawn’s The Fever for BBC’s Radio 4. Earlier this year, she did press for both Steven Soderbergh’s Black Bag and a West End production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, and she’s also set to appear in upcoming films Alpha Gang and Father Mother Sister Brother. While Blanchett didn’t specify what is driving her desire to stop acting, she did tell Radio Times that she doesn’t love doing interviews, noting that she finds herself to be “profoundly” dull and doesn’t always agree with how she comes across. “When you go on a talk show, or even here now, and then you see soundbites of things you’ve said, pulled out and italicised, they sound really … loud,” she said. “I’m not that person.”

And yet, Blanchett definitely hasn’t been quiet when it comes to expressing her feelings about leaf blowers. As far back as 2007, Blanchett told W Magazine that the lawn-care products “sum up everything that is wrong with the human race.” Over the years, she has slammed them for being useless, loud, ugly, detrimental to the environment, and bad for people’s health. When presented with a photo of one on a red carpet in 2019, she remarked that she could “rant” about leaf blowers for three hours. She told comedian Kareem Rahma this March that her “subway take” is that they need to be “eradicated from the face of the earth.” All this to say, if Blanchett is actually going to step away from acting sometime soon, the leaf blowers of the world might want to be scared about what she has planned for them.