Here are some nice photos of Cate Blanchett shooting a commercial for JVC in Italy on Sunday. There were a bunch of celebrities in town to shoot the ad – Matthew Fox and Kevin Spacey among them. What is JVC? Is it this – a Japenese electronics company? Or Jesuit Volunteer Corps? I don’t know. But Cate does look so pretty.

Cate is gearing up for the promotional tour for Robin Hood, in which she plays Maid Marion, if Maid Marion was, like, The Warrior Queen. They’ve got her in chain mail, they’ve got her doing archery, they’ve got her making out with Russell Crowe. All in all, she seems like a tough broad. Cate sat down for an interview with The London Times (full piece here) to promote the film. Here are some of the highlights:

On how motherhood has changed her career: “Anyone with children will tell you the same thing. Starting out as single women, our first questions about any job are, ‘What kind of role is it?’ and ‘Who will I be working with?’ But as soon as we have kids, we find ourselves asking, ‘How long’s the shoot?’ and ‘Can it be done in the school holidays?’ Suddenly, your attitude becomes very pragmatic. It has to, because shifting your household to another hemisphere is a major upheaval and there has to be a pretty compelling reason for you to do it.”

Why she took the part in Robin Hood: “To get the chance to work not just with Ridley, but also with Russell? I mean, c’mon, the dynamic duo! It seemed like a great way for us all to spend the summer back in the UK – and it was. In fact, it was thrilling. Our boys [Dashiell, 8, Roman, 6, and Ignatius, 2] had a ball. I went up in their estimation from the first night on set, when I was called on to shoot a flaming arrow, missed my mark and hit a light, which duly exploded. I mean, how many mums do stuff like that?”

On the new Maid Marion: “Rather than Robin simply coming to her rescue, Ridley was interested in depicting a woman who was completely unsentimental, who hardly knew her husband because he’d been away at war for ten years and who’d had to find her own means of survival. Then into her life walks this fellow and they form a bond.”

She doesn‘t hate Los Angeles: “I quite like Los Angeles. The underbelly of the city is really interesting to me. But a lot of my early film stuff ended up being shot around Europe and we headed for England instead. And now we’re back here and quite settled.”

She loves England too, where she lived for ten years: “[I miss] the seasons, definitely. I miss the cold. We were filming Robin Hood in Windsor Great Park, which I’d never visited before… That place is just divine. It could turn you into a tree-hugger. Friends, too, of course. And I miss Brighton a lot, which is where we were before leaving.”

Her sons go to school in Australia: “The boys go to the local state primary school and they love it there, love – like all kids – the routine of it.”

Cate on her all-boy family: “It’s loud. Really loud. So very loud.”

On her father‘s sudden death when she was a child: “One day he was just gone. Children adjust very quickly to circumstances, but I’m sure I’m still working out his absence in my head.”

On her boys: “There is that moment when you’re identifying something within your kids that reminds you of yourself and they catch you and say, ‘Stop looking at me funny!’ They don’t want that level of attention or sentimentality. But it is very touching when you see echoes of your parents, your brothers and sisters or your partner in them. Touching and strangely comforting, in fact. It completes some kind of circle, somehow.”

On how motherhood changed her: “It toughens you up and makes you more pragmatic, yet at the same time it turns you into a bowl of mush. You see a child in distress or a puppy waiting to cross the street and you just want to weep. Maybe that mix is good for an actor. I guess the great thing is that it increases your ability to switch on and off. The work is no longer the only thing in your life. Other things count – and count more.”

On meeting her husband, Andrew Upton: “At first, he thought I was aloof and I thought he was arrogant. It just shows how wrong you can be. Once he kissed me, that was that.”

[From The London Times]

I think it’s little sad that Cate doesn’t have a daughter. Obviously, she completely loves and adores her sons, and that’s not what I’m talking about at all. I just think Cate’s the kind of woman who would absolutely love having a daughter, someone she could play dress up with and do girl things. I can’t even imagine being a mom to three (Aussie) boys. How does she not wander around, covered in mud and spitballs and frogs?

Cate & Kevin Spacey on the set in Italy, filming a JVC commercial on May 9, 2010. Credit: Fame Pictures.