Cate Blanchett

Cate Blanchett (born 1969) is an Australian actor with two Academy Awards — for The Aviator and Blue Jasmine — and a career spanning Elizabeth, Carol, Lord of the Rings, and Tár. She is routinely counted among the finest screen performers alive.

“Deeply concerned”

Interviewed on the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg in late November 2024 while promoting Rumours — an apocalyptic satire about world leaders lost in a forest — Blanchett said the rise of AI “deeply concerned” her. What set her remarks apart from standard Hollywood anxiety was the direction of her worry: she said she was “less concerned” about her own profession and more about “the impact it will have on the average person.”

Her sharpest point was about voice replication: “Forget whether they’re an actor or not, if you’ve recorded yourself for three or four seconds, your voice can be replicated” — meaning the likeness problem actors were fighting over in the 2023 strikes now applies to anyone with a voicemail greeting. She called the threat “very real,” allowed that AI viewed one way “is creativity,” but concluded it is “also incredibly destructive,” adding of the broader tech wave: “I’m looking at these robots and driverless cars and I don’t really know what that’s bringing anybody.”

Blanchett has not joined lawsuits or campaigns; her opposition is rhetorical rather than organized. But as an artist with singular cultural authority, her framing — AI as a species-level worry, not a guild grievance — was widely picked up and echoed in coverage of the industry debate.