Words: Adrian Lobb
COVER FEATURE
“It’s very, very volatile at the moment,” says Cate Blanchett. We are talking, as you do, about religious and political dogma, colonialism and white supremacy, misogyny and the perilous state of democracy.
This time last year, Blanchett was at the Oscars, where Tár was nominated in six categories. Her latest venture is altogether different. In The New Boy, a film by Warwick Thornton, Blanchett plays a conflicted nun in a story of colonialism and Christianity in 1940s rural Australia.
The film opens by spelling out the context in brutal black and white: “For most of the 20th century, it was Australian government policy to breed out the black. This involved separating Indigenous children from their parents and their culture. The church and its missions were integral to much of this policy enactment.”
This is a film that looks exquisite and centres on a simple story. A young boy, played beautifully by Aswan Reid, arrives at the orphanage Sister Eileen (Blanchett) runs in the absence of the priest in charge. But this is also a film with something serious to say about this country’s colonial past, about the politics of today, and about so much more in its exploration of Indigenous spirituality coming into contact with unbending organised Christianity.
The New Boy grew out of lockdown. And out of a need to connect that so many of us felt. Blanchett heard that Thornton was considering his next project after the success of 2018’s Sweet Country, and before that, 2009’s award-winning Samson and Delilah. With more time than usual on her hands, she made contact.
“Like everybody, we were un-moored during the pandemic,” she says. “And it felt that there was a kind of a radical openness to a lot of those conversations. We went right back to our childhoods. I didn’t realise he’d been educated by monks after being sent away to Catholic boarding school to ‘straighten him out’.
“So the film came out of a very personal, angry place, I think, for Warwick. When we were filming it, he was wrestling with that young black man’s anger that is totally justifiable and understandable and is still inside him. But he was also wanting to make a film with a great deal of curiosity and tenderness. That wrestle was really complicated for him.”
While Thornton was forced into it, Blanchett grew up fascinated by the Catholic Church. “Not being raised at all religiously, I had such a desire to be part of the Ca
