Cate Blanchett Wants You To Drink Saké – Interview
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4 days ago
The Oscar-winning actress is the Creative Director of Toku, a British-owned Saké brand. She thinks her chops for storytelling uniquely qualify her to share its heritage with the West.
Here’s a truly global picture: Cate Blanchett (yes, that one) is the Australian Creative Director for Toku Saké, the British-owned saké brand that is brewed, of course, in Japan. C&TH sit down with her in this interview to find out why she’s not just the ‘name’ of the brand, and why she wants to share saké with the West.
Interview: Cate Blanchett On Saké, Storytelling & Her CV Beyond Acting
I am on the phone to Oscar-winning actress Cate Blanchett, but not to talk about her latest film role. Instead, we’re chatting about an alcoholic drink made from fermented rice, which – until recently – has mostly been relegated to the back aisles of the supermarket. Blanchett, it turns out, is truly, madly, deeply passionate about saké.
‘It’s been a long journey for me,’ she says. ‘I grew up living in the Asia-Pacific region, so I’d always had saké with a variety of cuisines – fusion foods – and when I then worked with a Japanese skincare company a few years ago, I was able to visit all these breweries. I found myself obsessed with the brewing process.’
And it is fascinating; it’s not a spirit, as is commonly assumed, but ferments in a way more akin to beer-making. The process of converting rice, yeast and koji into saké has also been around since 500 BCE, and it’s this heritage that Blanchett fell in love with.
Originally, she was planning to launch her own brand, but then, ‘serendipitously’, she was introduced to Anthony Newman, co-founder of Toku Saké, a British-owned brand, by a mutual friend in 2023. ‘And when I tried Toku, I had to down my tools,’ she says. ‘It was the most delicious cold saké I’d ever tasted.’ Ever since, she’s been the brand’s creative director.
Anthony is on the call, too, and he mostly gives airtime to Cate, but this is something he is keen to address: that much of that perceived barrier, our trepidation around drinking saké, comes from not knowing this story. And in turn this is because it’s literally never been communicated with us, ‘whether by language barriers, lack of marketing or lack of education, saké has been misunderstood in western cultures. This is our opportunity.’
Cate agrees. ‘I think for a western consumer… They might enjoy saké but they don’t because they can’t read the labels. It’s just that simple. So how do you invite them into this experience? Even translating it is enough to unlock it.’
Many imported sakés are still labelled in Japanese. But translation doesn’t end at the literal words on the bottles. ‘There’s a story missing,’ says Blanchett, ‘about Hokkaido, that cold Siberian air, and a really dynamic part of Japan with volcanoes and hot springs and extreme cold… I want to invite drinkers into this experience.’
And has it worked? ‘There’s certainly a growing desire for saké,’ Blanchett says, and the figures prove it. While wine sales continue to diminish, Waitrose’s Food and Drink Report 2025 says there was a 241 percent increase in searches for saké last year, to the point where it has expanded its range to include sparkling and plum options.
What’s striking to me, on this phone call, is that Cate talks about saké in both the terms of a passionate drinker – although she does emphasise that: ‘I’m not a lone drinker! I drink socially with friends’ – but also with the kind of expertise that you’d expect from an interview in a B2B title. That is to say bluntly that she speaks with rigour, and this isn’t a mutually beneficial licensing agreement. She is an investor in the brand, she is in the books, and crucially is really involved in the business day-to-day. Her unique experiences lend themselves to this; and her executive CV could teach any MBA a lesson or two. She has, after all, run the ‘de facto’ national theatre of Australia, but also her own film production company, Dirty Fish. She should not be underestimated.
‘Opportunities to be the “face of a brand” don’t appeal to me.’ she says, ‘I’m quite restless and always thinking about things I can do other than acting. Also when you come from outside a given sector, it affords you the opportunity to ask the “ignorant” questions, or ones that you sometimes forget to ask when you’ve been in an industry for too long.’ She is an investor in Toku, and involved in the running of the business day-to-day.
She’s also clearly enamoured by the whole ritual around drinking saké. ‘Maybe it’s just that I’m so visual – I’ve been collecting cups for a long time – but it’s about giving a gift to somebody. You bring your mother’s best china down, you get out a special glass for a special moment, you fetch the hand-embroidered napkins. There’s generosity in the experience. And in the wake of what’s going on in the world, it’s really important to be present.’
So, how then to best drink saké? ‘In the place of wine,’ quips Blanchett. ‘I’ve enjoyed many glasses of delicious wine, but the older I get, the more I find them too heavy to have with food. Saké has a lightness of spirit and finish that keeps any meal buoyant.’
And this is how it turns out that Oscar-winning Cate Blanchett tells me how she will enjoy tonight’s pasta supper – ‘chillis, capers, a melt-in-the-mouth creamy affair’ – not with a bold red, but a crisp, cold saké.
