Cate Blanchett, 57, has revealed she struggles to get more than four hours of sleep a night as she balances her Hollywood career with a 5am routine that includes feeding her chickens, walking the dogs, taking a cold-water plunge and doing the school run before starting work.
The Australian actress told Harper's Bazaar that her early starts, combined with what she calls her "love of late evenings," mean "the wheels are constantly falling off" due to her lack of sleep.
Blanchett, who is mother to Dashiell, 24, Roman, 22, Ignatius, 18, and 11-year-old Edith, splits her time between an East Sussex manor house and a clifftop house in Cornwall. She said her habits stem from decades spent working across film and theatre.
"I suppose it's years and years in the film industry, which is all early starts," she told Harper's Bazaar, speaking about her morning routine as she posed for a new photo shoot.
Sleep struggles and a hard word with herself
"But I'm also a creature of the theatre, so I love late evenings, the moment when everyone else goes to bed and I've got the house to myself," she said. "[But] I did have a hard word with myself about a year ago and said, 'You really need more than four hours [of sleep].' The wheels are constantly falling off. Constantly."
The photo shoot
In one image, taken by photographer Emma Summerton, Blanchett reclines on a red and white striped lilo wearing a velvet Stella McCartney dress with a bejewelled heart bodice from the brand's winter 2026 collection. The dress is stitched with what the label describes as "lead-free crystals," which it says are "safer for communities, the environment and all our fellow creatures." She wore dark sunglasses and black stilettos, with her hair styled in ringlets.
Career and new AI venture
Blanchett, who won Oscars for The Aviator in 2004 and Blue Jasmine in 2014, recently founded RSL Media, a not-for-profit online register where creatives can declare their consent for their work to be used by AI. She is also preparing for her run this month in the National Theatre's production of Electra/Persona, in which she will alternate roles with actress Nina Hoss.
Parenting in the digital age
Blanchett spoke about parenting her children as the youngest navigates beauty standards and technology. "[She is] on the cusp of all that stuff, but you have to keep the door to conversation open," she said. "They'll sense if you're coming to control or curate their relationship to their friends or the digital world."
On screen time, she said: "[I ask them] why do you need it? What are you doing that you can't do with a pen and paper? I try to have respectful arguments with my kids and explain my point of view."
MeToo and equality
Blanchett, a vocal advocate of the #MeToo movement when it took off in 2017, said she feels it has now been "rolled back" and "discredited," while women have still not achieved equality in the industry. "We were at an exciting point," she said. "But we've never reached equality of pay, and not only has MeToo been rolled back, and super-quickly discredited, but there's a conversation in one of the biggest democracies in the world [the US] about women not having the right to vote because of household voting."
Earthshot Prize and Prince William
Blanchett also sits on the Earthshot Prize Council, which works to find solutions to climate change through technology. She praised founder Prince William as "an extraordinary leader, very hands-on in a consistent and practically engaged way," adding that he had clearly "inherited" the interest from his father, King Charles, and had "grown up with it."
The September issue of Harper's Bazaar UK goes on sale August 6.
