Australian actress Cate Blanchett has lamented the #MeToo movement “got killed very quickly” in Hollywood, telling an audience at the Cannes Film Festival in France she has always been outspoken about gender equality and despairs at its lack of progress.
She outlined her feelings of hopelessness at events seemingly ignoring women and being “shut down”, saying:
It got killed very quickly, which I think is interesting.
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, person on the street, is saying ‘me too’. Why does that get shut down?
The 57-year-old went on to to highlight perceived ongoing imbalances on set, “I’m still on film sets and I do the headcount every day. There’s 10 women and there’s 75 men every morning,” she revealed.
Blanchett added: “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.”
ABC News Australia reports in 2018, when the Oscar-winner was president of the jury in Cannes, Blanchett led a red-carpet protest about the claimed hurtful moves made against women trying to make their way in the film industry.
She and 81 other women appeared on the steps of the Palais des Festivals, representing the total number of female directors selected for the competition since its inception.
Over the same period, 1,866 male directors had been selected.
The Independent reports Blanchett’s sentiments echoed those shared by fellow Oscar winner Julianne Moore at Cannes over the weekend.
Speaking at a Kering Women in Motion talk on Saturday, Moore said as recently as 2016, there were only a handful of women on film sets.
“I can remember being on a set not too long ago where the only women were me and the third AC [assistant camera],” she said.
“It’s when Hillary Clinton lost the election, and we were both devastated. And I said ‘Look around the room. We’re the only ones here.’ I’ve certainly seen more gender representation in crews. It was unusual, when I was coming up, to see women on a crew.”
The “Me Too” movement owes its antecedents to activist Tarana Burke who initiated the concept in 2006. It was designed to help survivors of sexual violence.
It became a viral global phenomenon in October 2017, when actress Alyssa Milano encouraged people to use the hashtag #MeToo in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse allegations.