Cate Blanchett Suffers Chainsaw Injury to the Head While in Coronavirus Quarantine

Cate Blanchett had a close call with a chainsaw while working with the power tool at her home in England. The Oscar-winning actress revealed she emerged unscathed from the incident, apart from “a little nick to [her] head” on last week’s episode of A Podcast of One’s Own with former Australia Prime Minister Julia Gillard.

“I’m fine. I had a bit of a chainsaw accident yesterday, which sounds very, very exciting, but it wasn’t,” the actress, 51, said. “Apart from the little nick to my head, we’re fine.” Gillard joked in response, “Be very careful with that chainsaw. You’ve got a very famous head, I don’t think people want to see any nicks taken out of it,” to which Blanchett responded cheekily, “I want to keep it on my shoulders.”

Also during Gillard’s podcast, Blanchett revealed that she and husband Andrew Upton are quarantining with their four kids, Dashiell, 18, Roman, 16, Ignatius, 12, and Edith, 5. The Blue Jasmine actress had previously decided to take a year off from work to help her oldest son with his schooling before the pandemic struck.

“I took the year off ostensibly to be with him and support him through that exam period,” she explained, joking that after “all that exam stuff evaporated” with the closing of schools, she is now left with “an 18-year-old who doesn’t really want to have anything to do with me.” She said with a laugh, “So it’s a little bit discombobulating, but it’s a high-class problem. We’re all well.”

Blanchett has been homeschooling her 5-year-old while in quarantine as well. “And so I found myself being a kindergarten teacher to my 5-year-old, which is just as challenging,” she revealed. “I have a huge respect for the teaching profession.”

Blanchett has been dropping all sorts of interesting tidbits while on the podcast circuit recently, revealing on a May 11 episode of WTF With Marc Maron that she almost had a secret second role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, in which she played Galadriel. “I loved it so much and I did say to [Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh], they were doing a banquet scene with a whole lot of dwarves,” she said. “I always wanted to play the bearded lady, so I asked them, could I be your hairy wife woman when you pan across the banquet table of dwarves?”

The actress added she was also interested in portraying another character because there aren’t “too many chicks in the Tolkien universe.” In the end, a scheduling clash made it so she was unable to work on the role.