Cate Blanchett joined Cannes moderator Didier Allouch for a talk at the 2026 edition of the film festival and lamented how the #MeToo movement “got killed very quickly.” The two-time Oscar winner notably served as Cannes jury president in 2018 at the height of #MeToo and led a women’s march where she held hands with Kristen Stewart, Léa Seydoux, Ava DuVernay, Agnès Varda and more as they walked up the steps of the Palais des Festivals.
“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 is saying #MeToo. Why does that get shut down?” Blanchett asked. “What [the movement] revealed is a systemic layer of abuse, not only in this industry but in all industries, and if you don’t identify a problem, you can’t solve the problem.”
Blanchett noted that the imbalance of power between men and women in the film industry continues to this day.
“I’m still on film sets and I do the headcount every day, and it is still, you know… there’s 10 women and there’s 75 men every morning,” the actor said. “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. I think it has an effect on the work.”
