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The act of being silenced isn’t one that’s always easily seen. Often, the silence isn’t coming from a physical place, but from a trauma that forces one to feel like they need to keep things unspoken. Such is the conflict at the center of Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ limited series “Disclaimer,” which streamed its final episode this past Sunday. In the show, Cate Blanchett‘s journalist/documentarian Catherine Ravenscroft is confronted with a past dalliance that resulted in the death of a young man. While initially, we are led to believe Catherine courted this boy, the series finale reveals that it was he who went after her and that he in fact sexually assaulted her at knifepoint.
“I felt very strongly, as did Alfonso, that we didn’t want to trick the audience,” Blanchett said in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter regarding the finale’s twist. “That the truth, as is so often, is hiding in plain sight. And the way in which we avoid acknowledging it reveals a lot about who we are. So it was to allow the audience to confront perhaps the way they absorb narratives or information or stories, or whether they like or dislike the actions of a character that they’re watching and who they naturally would side with, and that they can sit comfortably uncomfortable in those unexamined prejudicial points of view that I guess we all naturally have. If they were to go back and watch a second time, they might be able to see, rather than someone who is not speaking and who is accused of lying, that perhaps she wasn’t given the chance to speak.”
While the conversation around sexual assault has opened up greatly thanks to the #MeToo movement, many still feel it’s not their place to come forward and share their stories. For Catherine in “Disclaimer,” in many ways, she is ultimately forced to, igniting lingering trauma she’d tried to keep in the past.
“There are many, many infinite reasons why people stay silent. From my character’s perspective, it’s her controlling her grief and rage and not wanting to be retraumatized. As a survivor of sexual assault, she can’t do all the work. She’s already survived the experience and tried as best she could to move forward. Her boundaries have already been crossed,” said Blanchett. “And I think perhaps we might see what happens when it’s made harder for someone to be heard, and to risk them being retraumatized and reexperiencing an event that has been hard enough to move through already. It takes a lot of energy to hide one’s feelings, so I didn’t realize how tense I was for six months until we finally filmed the confrontation scene with Kevin [Kline] where I could finally speak.”
Kline plays the young man’s father in the series. Under the impression that Catherine had seduced his son and led him to his death, he set about revealing the “truth” via a book his late wife had written, as well as sharing with Catherine’s family nude photographs his son had taken of her. Finally, after years of not being able to share her side of the story, Catherine tells Kline’s character the truth in an extensive monologue that details his son’s violent tendencies.
“A couple of days before, because it was the culmination of so much that had gone prior, I said to Alfonso that we should probably just film it as one long monologue. A 30-page monologue, and he could pick and choose which parts he wanted to have onscreen and which parts he wanted to have in flashback,” Blanchett said. “But it was an enormous relief to finally have given voice to that trauma, to be able to tell the story in its entirety. Because at first, I think you could look at this scene and say it’s slightly heightened, would the story unfold like this? But I think because my character had not been in charge of the way the narrative had unfolded, it was really important to speak the story out and rewrite the perspectives on that history that was actually hers, but that no one had bothered to shine a light on.”
All episodes of “Disclaimer” are now available to stream on Apple TV+.