Like every parent during lockdown, Cate Blanchett had to go to great lengths to keep her children entertained.
In an interview with the BBC published on Monday, the actor, 52, revealed she dressed up as her 7-year-old daughter Edith’s teacher to home-school her during the intense quarantine at the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
“She wouldn’t allow me at all to teach maths or do phonics unless I dressed up as her teacher and put on her teacher’s voice,” Blanchett explained. “I had an array of stuffed animals who also had to be taught. It wasn’t an offer I made. It was a request she made.”
When the BBC suggested Blanchett channel her 2020 teacher-mode, she replied, “No. (It) was so traumatic for me I’ve actually put my Mrs. Venables Kyrke to bed.”
Blanchett added, “She was her teacher then. She’s a saint.”
The “Nightmare Alley” star shares Edith and her three sons Dashiell, 20, Roman, 17, and Ignatius, 13, with her husband Andrew Upton. Blanchett and the screenwriter, 55, have been married since 1997.
During lockdown, the family gathered together in their home in East Sussex, England, according to the BBC. Blanchett told the news outlet that home-schooling her children for almost a year helped her develop a greater appreciation for teachers.
She praised educators for being in "an inherently dramatic situation where you have to stand up in front of a class of 30 often disinterested pupils and try and get them engaged in medieval history.”
While at home, her family passed the time by tending to their pigs and chickens and watching “The Sopranos.”
When lockdown restrictions finally lifted, Blanchett recalled feeling “happy with the ending, except that it ended.”
Blanchett previously opened up about teaching Dashiell during quarantine on an episode of “A Podcast of One’s Own” with former Australia Prime Minister Julia Gillard in June 2020.
“I took the year off ostensibly to be with him and support him through that exam period,” she shared at the time. “All of that exam stuff evaporated, and I’m left with an 18-year-old who doesn’t really want to have anything to do with me.”
She laughed and called the relationship with her oldest son “a high-class problem.”
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