Cate Blanchett on Potentially Playing Lucille Ball: 'She's One of My All-Time Great Heroes'
Blanchett stars as former "60 Minutes" producer Mary Mapes in "Truth."
— -- Cate Blanchett has confirmed she is in “the early days” of talks with screenwriter Aaron Sorkin to play the legendary comedienne Lucille Ball.
“It’s early days but Aaron Sorkin and I are talking about [it],” Blanchett said today on “Good Morning America." “We don’t know what form it’s going to be in but there’s a lot of material there.”
Variety reported last month that the Oscar winner had already signed up to a Sorkin-penned biopic of Ball, the beloved 1950s TV comic and star of the classic sitcom “I Love Lucy.”
While only confirming the discussions between her and Sorkin are in the “early days,” Blanchett called Ball one of her “all-time great heroes.”
“She was an extraordinary woman,” Blanchett said.
The Oscar winner also used the word “extraordinary” to describe Mary Mapes, the former “60 Minutes” producer she is portraying in her latest movie, “Truth.”
Blanchett stars in “Truth” alongside Robert Redford, who portrays Dan Rather in the film about the 2004 “60 Minutes II” report on President George W. Bush’s time in the Texas Air National Guard.
Blanchett called working with Redford “extraordinary” and said she felt a “very particular responsibility” in playing Mapes, who was fired after the network, CBS, conducted an independent investigation and ultimately retracted and apologized for the report.
“It’s every journalist’s worst nightmare,” Blanchett said of the fallout for Mapes. “Even though it feels like recently, it’s 2004… and…the media landscape, the political landscape, has changed entirely. It was at the beginning of the whole kind of hateful blogosphere.”
Away from the big screen, Blanchett says she and her husband, Andrew Upton, feel “very blessed” after adopting a baby girl, Edith, in March.
“She’s great,” Blanchett said of Edith, who is joined in the family by Blanchett and Upton’s three sons. “It’s a wonderful thing when you see your children becoming a pack and sort of independent of you and I’m very proud of my sons.”