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.”
Julianne Moore also spoke up at Cannes about the gender disparity that continues on film sets. During her Kering Women in Motion Talk, the “Still Allice” Oscar winner said that “I can remember being on a set not too long ago where the only women were me and the third AC.”
“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,’” Moore added. “I’ve certainly seen more gender representation in crews. It was unusual when I was coming up to see women on a crew.”
At the 2018 Cannes women’s march, Blanchett was one of 82 women who protested. The actor explained how that number was a reference to the amount of female directors who had competed at Cannes up until that point in the festival’s history, compared to the 1,866 male directors over the same period.
“Women are not a minority in the world, yet the current state of the industry says otherwise,” Blanchett said at the time. “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. We are writers, producers, directors, actresses, cinematographers, talent agents, editors, distributors, sales agents and all involved in the cinematic arts.”
At the time of the women’s march, Cannes organizers were being criticized for failing to do more to publicly acknowledge the #MeToo and Time’s Up initiatives.
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