Cate Blanchett on getting her Borderlands Lilith wig just right: 'Everyone was a bit scared of it at first'

Cate Blanchett knows there's no such thing as "too much" in the highly stylized, cell-shaded world of Borderlands.

The actress tells Entertainment Weekly that she advocated for several changes to her character Lilith's design in the upcoming film adaptation of the award-winning video games series after the fierce gunslinger's look initially appeared a bit too soft for her liking. The first thing on her list? Getting her hairstylist, Kerry Warn, to create a swoopy, sculptural wig in the character's signature red hue. 

“We started off going pale pink and thinking, ‘Oh, it's too extreme,’” Blanchett recalls. “And so I really did push for that fiery, almost sort of fluorescent red, because I just thought it was going to be great once we got out in the sunlight. I think everyone was a bit scared of it at first, about how extreme it was, but I'm glad we did it.” 

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She also encouraged the costume department to roughen up Lilith's outfit and add some of the character's smaller accoutrements that she sports throughout the games.

"What I loved about Lilith was she's a bit ripped up.... I really pushed to get a bit of shoulder pads and get the knee pads and — knowing that we were going to be in sunlight, but also in the darkness for a long time — having something that had a bit of sheen to it," she explains. "It was important that it could withstand all those things and be interesting enough to follow through, but not distracting.” 

Directed by Eli Roth, Borderlands centers around Lilith, a hired gun who's tasked by Atlas (Edgar Ramirez), the most powerful man in the galaxy, to track down his missing daughter on Pandora, Lilith's home world that she fled years earlier. Back on the wasteland, she's forced to band together with a team of misfits: Claptrap (Jack Black), Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt), Krieg (Florian Munteanu), Roland (Kevin Hart), and Dr. Patricia Tannis (Jamie Lee Curtis).

When it came to crafting her version of Lilith, Blanchett found inspiration in both the games and the Borderlands cosplay community. She spoke with several Lilith cosplayers as part of her research, exchanging notes and receiving makeup tutorials from them both on set and over Zoom.

"It was to go back to the fans, all the cosplay, and work out how they put their Lilith together, because there's such an incredible ownership of these characters. So it was diving into the game, but it was also the fanbase that I found so fascinating," she says. "The whole idea of cosplay and how idiosyncratic it is, the way different people would riff on their Lilith, I found really inspiring, actually. It was a big cut and paste for me in trying to put her together on screen."

Borderlands leaps out of the vault and into movie theaters on Aug. 9.

— Reporting by Nick Romano