Cate Blanchett has voiced her concern that the #MeToo movement was "killed very quickly" in Hollywood, speaking at the Cannes Film Festival on Sunday.
The actor, a prominent advocate for gender equality, lamented the movement's diminished momentum within the industry.
"It got killed very quickly, which I think is interesting," Blanchett stated.
She questioned why the movement's impact appeared to wane, contrasting those with platforms and the general public. "There are a lot of people with platforms who are able to speak up with relative safety and say this has happened to me," she observed. "And the so-called average woman on the street, person on the street, is saying MeToo. Why does that get shut down?"
Her observations continue to highlight 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."
Blanchett has a history of campaigning for gender parity in film.
In 2018, as president of the Cannes jury, she led a red-carpet protest alongside more than 80 other women, including Jane Fonda, Salma Hayek, Amber Heard and Marion Cotillard, symbolically representing the number of female directors selected for the festival's competition lineup against 1,866 male directors over the same period.
At the time, Blanchett, alongside acclaimed French director Agnes Varda, said in a statement: “As women, we all face our own unique challenges, but we stand together on these stairs today as a symbol of our determination and commitment to progress.”
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 that 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.”
Read MoreJavier Bardem accuses Trump, Putin and Netanyahu of ‘male toxic behaviour’
Hollywood star reveals he exiled himself to Peru when fame got too much