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Cate Blanchett will be portraying Donald Trump's sister Maryanne in James Gray's upcoming movie Armageddon Time.
It was announced last year that the Australian actress has joined the Ad Astra director's new project, alongside Robert De Niro, Oscar Isaac, Anne Hathaway, and Donald Sutherland, and now the filmmaker has shared who she will be playing.
"Cate Blanchett is going to play Donald Trump's sister which is the weirdest sentence I have ever said," Gray said during the Doha Film Institute's Qumra online event, reports Screen Daily. "She's only in it for three days, she's doing me a favour. She has a really long speech to deliver, it's a real scene-stealer. I've tried to recreate the real speech as best I could from memory."
Armageddon Time is an autobiographical coming-of-age drama about growing up in Queens, New York, in the 1980s, with particular focus on Gray's time at the Kew-Forest School, which counts the former U.S. President and his sister Maryanne as alumni. Maryanne once visited the school when Gray was there to give a speech to the students.
"It's very simply kind of a memoir about when I was twelve and in the fall of 1980 in New York about my best friend and my relationship with him and when I moved from public school to private school," Gray told Collider last year about the movie. "And how my relationship with him was destroyed in the process."
Blanchett is no stranger to playing real people - she has previously portrayed Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, Bob Dylan in I'm Not There, Irish reporter Veronica Guerin in the movie of the same name, and most recently, conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly in the TV miniseries Mrs. America.
Her upcoming projects include Adam McKay's star-studded movie Don't Look Up, also starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Chris Evans, and Jennifer Lawrence, Guillermo del Toro's Nightmare Alley, and the movie adaptation of video game Borderlands.