‘Was I cast because you couldn’t get anyone else?’ Cate Blanchett discusses Rumours

At last, a film about the G7. There have been more movies than you can shake a stick at set in the Oval Office and No. 10 and other citadels. But not once has cinema gathered democracy’s prime septet in the same frame, the way the annual Group of Seven summit does. Until Rumours.

‘Did you cast me because you couldn’t get anyone else to do it?’ Blanchett asks

To play the leaders of the free world at this geopolitically sensitive moment, Rumours has attracted stars of magnitude. Cate Blanchett is the German chancellor, Charles Dance the American president. Roy Dupuis plays Canada’s pin-up prime minister and Alicia Vikander gives us her Swedish secretary-general of the EU. Blanchett, though Australian, slips into the role of Teutonic host Hilda Ortmann as comfortably as all those other powerful women she has portrayed: Elizabeth I, Lydia Tár, Galadriel, the anti-feminist firebrand Phyllis Schlafly. Is there something that draws her, I enquire over Zoom, to female formidability?

‘Gosh,’ she says. Blanchett is on my screen wearing a red top, dark-framed glasses and a serious expression. ‘Yes, I suppose one can piece together a narrative of choices of projects or roles, but it doesn’t actually work like that. The narrative is like those tin cans that trail behind Just Married on a car. Someone else puts them there, not me.’

Her German chancellor, if based on anyone, is inspired less by Angela Merkel than Ursula von der Leyen. She has good tailoring and immaculate English and speaks deferentially of Roy Jenkins and the Maastricht Treaty. Such a film sounds like Remainiac catnip, but what could possibly be the plot?