Australian actress Cate Blanchett says she is “serious about giving up acting” as there are “lots of things I want to do with my life”.

The 55-year-old, who is preparing to star in her first radio drama in BBC Radio 4’s The Fever, has told Britain’s Radio Times she is still not totally comfortable with being a celebrity.

While introducing herself for the tape, Blanchett hesitated to call herself as actress, which co-director John Tiffany pointed out.

“I did, didn’t I? It’s because I’m giving up,” she said.

“My family roll their eyes every time I say it, but I mean it.

“I am serious about giving up acting. [There are] a lot of things I want to do with my life.”

The Australian most recently starred in the spy thriller Black Bag (2025), and has won two Oscars for best supporting actress in The Aviator (2005) and best actress in Blue Jasmine (2013).

“When you go on a talk show, or even here now, and then you see soundbites of things you’ve said, pulled out and italicised, they sound really loud. I’m not that person,” she told Radio Times of her her experience of being a celebrity.

“I make more sense in motion – it’s been a long time to remotely get comfortable with the idea of being photographed.

“I’ve always felt like I’m on the periphery of things, so I’m always surprised when I belong anywhere. I go with curiosity into whatever environment that I’m in, not expecting to be accepted or welcomed.

“I’ve spent a lifetime getting comfortable with the feeling of being uncomfortable.”

Blanchett rose to fame with her role as Queen Elizabeth I in Elizabeth (1998), and went on to star in the Lord Of The Rings trilogy as Galadriel, and Ocean’s 8 (2018).

Last year, she said she’d be paid “nothing” for her Lord of the Rings role.

“No, no one got paid anything to do that movie,” Blanchett told US TV chat show host Andy Cohen on Watch What Happens Live.

“I wanted to work with the guy who made Braindead (director Peter Jackson). I mean, I basically got free sandwiches and I got to keep my [prosthetic] ears. No, no one got paid anything.”

Most recently, Blanchett has finished a six-week run in The Seagull in London. She will next appear in the star-studded alien invasion comedy Alpha Gang, from the Zellner brothers, which she is also producing.

She also has triptych feature film Father, Mother, Sister, Brother in the pipeline, as well as her latest movie, The New Boy, to be released in May. But despite her extensive acting career, Blanchett remains uncomfortable with the publicity process.

“No one is more boring to me than myself and I find other people much more interesting. I find myself profoundly dull,” she told Radio Times.

Nor is it the first time Blanchett has mused about a future beyond acting.

“I always thought, if the acting thing didn’t work out, which it still might not, I would love to be a Foley artist,” she told The Guardian in an interview published in March.

“One day I’m going to grow up and get a proper job.”

In 2019, she told Julia Roberts during a conversation for Interview magazine that:

“As you get older, acting just gets more and more humiliating. When I was younger, I would wonder why the older actors I admired kept talking about quitting. Now I realise it’s because they want to maintain a connection to the last shreds of their sanity.”

Blanchett also has a long history in theatre productions. She was a co-director of the Sydney Theatre Company from 2008 to 2013, alongside her husband Andrew Upton. He remained in the role until 2015.

She and Upton have three sons – Dashiell, 23, Roman, 20, and Ignatius, 17 – and a 10-year-old-daughter, Edith.

-with AAP