Cate Blanchett Confronts Public Disgrace in Alfonso Cuarón’s Revenge Thriller ‘Disclaimer’ | Vanity Fair

Disclaimer delivers an ominous warning to viewers in its very title. Alfonso Cuarón’s new Apple TV+ show, which debuts on October 11, stars Cate Blanchett as a powerful journalist who finds troubling details from her own secret past inside the pages of a lurid novel. Kevin Kline is the frail and lonesome old man who publishes it, eager to inflict not just pain, but also humiliation on the woman he believes caused his own loss and sorrows.

The show derives its name from the standard legal indemnification found in the front of nearly every book. In this case, though, the disclaimer is actually a twisted taunt printed in the opening of the book she is sent: “Any resemblance to persons living or dead is not a coincidence.” Disclaimer is a cautionary tale about the urge to punish, and the way half-truths harden into misplaced rage.

Alfonso Cuarón (left) and cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki (right) behind the scenes of Disclaimer on locatoni in Forte dei Marmi, Italy.

“It’s as old as humanity. We have an immense facility to create judgments,” says Cuarón, the five-time Oscar-winning filmmaker behind Roma, Gravity, and Children of Men. “But there’s a pleasure about it. You can see it nowadays in how easily people jump onto the bandwagon. That is a part of humanity that makes us feel a bit above, that makes us feel a bit more comfortable with ourselves. ‘There’s always someone that is a bit worse than me.’”

Public shaming has been a constant throughout human history, of course, but it now takes place at the speed of tweet. “I’m not saying that it hasn’t happened before, but it’s more unified than ever,” Cuarón says. Similar themes also turn up in Blanchett’s 2022 drama Tár.

Cate Blanchett and Sacha Baron Cohen as Catherine and Robert in happier times at the start of the series.

Blanchett herself describes Disclaimer as dealing with “sharp, quick, and lasting judgments” forged out of harshness rather than empathy. “Maybe we add our voices to the cacophony for fear of being judged ourselves. We are all the heroes of our own narratives, right?” she tells Vanity Fair. “To that end there is much unflattering human behavior depicted in the series.”

In that sense, Disclaimer is not about contemporary cancel culture any more than it’s about the zeal to punish in historic incidents like witch trials, inquisitions, or Red Scares. It’s more focused on personal relationships than mob mentality. The show explores the nature of condemnation, but holds back on pointing fingers. “I’m sure there’s an evolutionary trait there for why we fall into judgments of other people so easily,” Cuarón says. The problem, he adds, is “when those judgments don’t come from informed facts and just come from what other people are talking about, or saying, or claiming.”

Blanchett’s Catherine Ravenscroft is ripe for a public downfall, partly because she has so much to lose. As the show begins, she is a celebrated journalist, admired by coworkers and doted on by her husband, Robert (an obsequious Sacha Baron Cohen), who brings his family’s wealth and power to the equation. Only her 20-something son (The Power of the Dog’s Kodi Smit-McPhee) seems to reject her, but most parents know that’s not uncommon. He has financial and substance abuse problems of his own, and his rejection is a bulwark against her disappointment.

Kodi Smit-McPhee’s Nicolas Ravenscroft gets some harrowing messages that further strain his relationship with his mother.

Catherine has also been building barriers within herself as well. Others assume they know her story in part because she struggles to reckon with it herself. “What I became fascinated by was how a person can be altered in imperceptible ways when traumatic events are buried and remain unprocessed,” Blanchett tells Vanity Fair. “People carrying around concealed trauma can have no idea how heavy this burden is, how deep their rage and shame.”

Blanchett says Catherine is susceptible because she’s too paralyzed to express the actual truth: “[She] subconsciously feared her rage would get out of control and so she avoided conflict, avoided standing up for herself or losing her cool with people for fear of her rage exploding. Catherine was to me a person who was misunderstood as being self-contained or stoic, when in fact she was someone who found it difficult to imagine she even had a right to feel anything.”

Cuarón described the character’s buried memories as a kind of toxin infecting her body: “Secrets that you repress, eventually, sooner or later, they find a way to come out into the skin.”

Kevin Kline in the present day as Stephen Brigstocke, plotting sadistic revenge against the woman he blames for his son’s death.

Kline’s Stephen Brigstocke, meanwhile, is a worn-out teacher at the end of a less than eventful life. His own son died two decades ago in a drowning accident, and his late wife (played in flashbacks by Lesley Manville) spent her remaining years embittered and grieving, pulling away from him and living in her dead child’s room until her own time ran out. As the numb old man finally gets around to purging her belongings, he finds a rough draft of a manuscript she wrote in secret. There is also a collection of photographs. The novel tells the story of a married woman who had a lustful affair with a young stranger while on vacation in Italy—ending with his drowning death. Erotic snapshots of the woman seemingly illustrate the tale, suggesting the document is not actually fiction.

The manuscript’s salacious story is so thinly veiled, and the snapshots of her so clear, that Brigstocke recognizes the woman in question as Catherine Ravenscroft. This sets him off on a plan to self-publish the novel as the first step in a very public downfall.

Lesley Manville’s Nancy Brigstocke in flashback scenes from Disclaimer, as the mother of a lost son who writes a poison pen story about what she believes caused his death.

Brigstocke is an especially dangerous predator because he is camouflaged by his apparent feebleness. Kline credits Disclaimer’s makeup and hair department, headed by Elizabeth Yianni-Georgiou (an Oscar-nominee for Guardians of the Galaxy), as well as costume designer Jany Temime (a veteran of the Harry Potter films)—who gave him a tattered wardrobe highlighted by the too tight, moth-eaten pink sweater that Brigstocke insists on wearing because it was his wife’s favorite.

“In general, I believe the look is meant to be that of a harmless, old ex-professor, conventionally attired so as not to call attention to himself,” Kline says. “But he does let himself go the more he is consumed by his mission.”

As the series unfolds, the scandalous events of the novel Brigstocke uses as his cudgel are presented to the viewer in soft-focus (and relatively soft-core) interstitials. Louis Partridge (Enola Holmes, Argylle) plays the shy but eager young man, and Leila George (the Animal Kingdom TV series) plays the calculating temptress. Exactly what happens between them takes a while to play out, but Brigstocke believes—as did his late wife—that the female character is based on Catherine Ravenscroft, and he blames her for his son’s untimely end. He intends to use his remaining time and resources offloading his misery onto her. All the while, it’s not entirely clear what the actual truth is—not that anyone involved in the ensuing retribution cares. “That is not important. What's important is to join the fun,” Cuarón says ruefully.

Louis Partridge and Leila George in a scene from the novel that wrecks the life of Cate Blanchett’s character.

Disclaimer marks a major shift for an internationally acclaimed filmmaker who has previously kept his focus on lean, visceral storytelling for the big screen. Early in his career, Cuarón directed a handful of standalone episodes of Twilight Zone–like Mexican anthology shows and co-created the 2014 show Believe, but Disclaimer is a much more immersive dive into series television. He writes and directs all seven episodes of the show, which is adapted from Renée Knight’s 2015 book.

Doing TV, Cuarón says, gave him an opportunity to be indulgent and expansive with his plot points, rather than trimming them to their shortest possible form. “In television, you go A, B, C, D. In film, you find a way to go from A to D directly. Here it was about experimenting with something different. I have never done something so overtly narrative.”

TV shows may have the capacity to go long, but they are frequently made quickly. Cuarón was less interested in that part. “The miscalculation is that I don’t know how to do TV,” he jokes. “And I don’t think that at this stage, I want to really learn.” He likens the series to a seven-hour-long movie.

Louis Partridge as Jonathan Brigstocke on holiday in 2001 in Italy, taking a tourist-y photo.

Leila George as the wife and mother who becomes the focus of much more salacious snapshots by Jonathan.

Apple trusted him. “They were very generous when I said I could only do it as a film,” Cuarón says. “In a TV show, you shoot five pages a day, and sometimes even more. I shoot one page a day. So the shoot was very, very long. We were shooting with pandemic restrictions and with actors getting COVID, meaning changes of schedule and domino effects happening.” Now the marathon production is finally complete—and the result is a lavishly crafted, emotionally complex freefall into the darkest depths.

At its core, Disclaimer is all about storytelling—the stories people create to reassure themselves, and the ones they use to stoke their own fury. Unreliable narrators abound, and Cuarón even features different styles of voiceover to emphasize how differently the central characters perceive the facts. An omniscient third-person voice narrates the romantic scenes from the book, while Brigstocke’s inner monologue is in the first person. “By working with those voices, you dig further inside the characters. You can dig further inside fears, inside anxieties, inside their past, their guilt, their misgivings,” the filmmaker says.

But Cuarón does something very different for the sequences involving Blanchett’s character and her family. “The second person is always following Catherine. The second person is the ‘you,’” he says. As she goes about the story, this second person voice (supplied by Blanchett herself) addresses the action as “You did this…” or “You feel that…”

Sacha Baron Cohen costars as Blanchett’s husband, Robert, scion of a wealthy family who is made to feel small by the story of her infidelity.

“I’ve always been intrigued, because there are not many films that use the second person in narration,” Cuarón says. His intention was to create a subconscious effect on the viewers that further isolated her character. “Second person” may be the term for this narrative perspective in English, but Cuarón points out that other languages have a grammar construction called something very different: “In Spanish and in French, the second tense is called accusativo. Accusative. It is accusing,” he says. “That was part of the reason for creating that voice in the second person.”

Despite the show’s many voices, there is very little listening. “I think Disclaimer underscores how our very vociferous public judgments isolate us from each other and prevent common ground from being located,” Blanchett says. “We keep falling into linguistic traps and eddying around our own perspective in events, rather than getting anywhere near the common ground of collectively understood truth.”

Blanchett’s Ravencroft suffers immensely throughout the story—rightly or wrongly—as her secrets emerge and her life crumbles, but Kline’s Brigstocke is actually revived by his manipulations and vendettas. He no longer has anyone he loves, but he has found someone to hate.

Kevin Kline as Stephen Brigstocke circa 2001, visiting the site of his son’s death two decades before he seeks revenge.

“Stephen is a man that has given up on life,” Cuarón says. “And in the moment in which he was about to give up completely, he finds a reason to go on. He lives in that past, in the past of that pink cardigan that he wears all the time, in a house that he hasn't touched since his dear ones died. And suddenly he has a reason to live in the present. And he’s taking it. He’s going 100% into it.”

An old saying claims that “living well is the best revenge.” Disclaimer suggests that, for some, revenge itself makes life worth living.