A recent story at Variety confirms that Cate Blanchett is the first cast announcement for Pedro Almodóvar‘s A Manual for Cleaning Ladies. This will be Almodóvar‘s first English-language feature film, but his extensive career features over forty Spanish-language titles, including Talk to Her, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Parallel Mothers. A Manual for Cleaning Ladies will be an adaptation of the short-story collection of the same name by author Lucia Berlin, containing forty-three stories about women who each have various demanding jobs. The book explores a range of experiences across each short story’s protagonists, from laundromat workers and women in halfway houses to upper-class Bay Area residents and struggling mothers.

The project is still in the early stages of development, with Blanchett being the only cast member announced so far. The film will also be produced by Blanchett‘s production company Dirty Films, in collaboration with New Republic Pictures and in association with El Deseo. Other producers for the film include Andrew Upton and Coco Francini, as well as Brian Oliver and Bradley Fischer with Almodóvar. Almodóvar also shared that he’s writing the script in Spanish before translating it to English. The writer and director developed an English short in 2020 titled The Human Voice with Tilda Swinton, which received much critical acclaim.

Blanchett has also been busy with multiple recent projects, including Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up and Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley. Both films have been positively received by audiences. In Don’t Look Up, Blanchett slips into a parody of a right-wing news anchor set on pretending everything is fine in spite of the impending end of the world, and her role in Nightmare Alley gives her a little more room to flex her acting abilities as she steals the show as the film’s femme fatale.

Blanchett has won two Academy Awards, one for Best Supporting Actress for The Aviator, and another for Best Actress for Blue Jasmine. In addition to A Manual for Cleaning Women, her upcoming projects for this year include Del Toro and Mark Gustafson‘s Pinocchio, Borderlands from Eli Roth, and TÁR from Todd Field. She’s also been announced as Lady Marchmain for a Brideshead Revisited miniseries.

There is no planned release date yet for A Manual for Cleaning Women, but production is expected to begin later this year. Stay tuned at Collider as we receive more casting announcements for the film.

via Collider