Cate Blanchett practiced conducting for Tár in full Lilith attire on Borderlands set (exclusive)

Picture it: Cate Blanchett channeling Lydia Tár while dressed as Lilith, the gunslinger with the fiery red hair from the Borderlands video games. Jamie Lee Curtis didn't have to picture it. She saw it.

The Halloween horror icon has that distinct memory of her costar during the production of Borderlands, the Eli Roth-directed video game movie adaptation that shot in Budapest in 2021. Curtis says she would often glance over and see Blanchett sitting in her chair on set, wearing her full Lilith costume (wig and all), listening to music, and conducting an invisible orchestra with her hands.

"I was like, 'What are you doing?'" Curtis recalls in an interview with Entertainment Weekly for our Borderlands-pegged Comic-Con cover story. "She said, 'Oh, I have this job I'm going to next.'" That job was Tár, the 2022 film from filmmaker Todd Field starring the two-time Oscar winner as composer-conductor Lydia Tár. "She went straight to Berlin from Budapest," Curtis, also an Oscar winner for Everything Everywhere All at Once, adds. "That's how long ago we made this movie."

"Perhaps if you're doing two things that were vaguely similar, it might be a little bit confusing," Blanchett tells EW in a separate interview of her experience, "but you couldn't get two more diametrically opposed projects than Borderlands and Tár."

Blanchett stars in Borderlands as Lilith, a hired gun who grew up on the lawless planet of Pandora, a place known for attracting Vault Hunters, those determined to find and crack open the treasures hidden within various vaults scattered around the wasteland terrain. When she's hired to track down the missing daughter of the most powerful man in the galaxy, Lilith is forced to return to her old haunt.

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Along the way, she haphazardly assembles herself a group of misfits: the chatter-box droid Claptrap (voiced by Jack Black), the mentally unhinged explosives expert Tiny Tina (Ariana Greenblatt) and her muscle guardian Krieg (Florian Munteanu), former soldier Roland (Kevin Hart), and neurodivergent scientist/archaeologist Dr. Patricia Tannis (Curtis) — the latter also being an old friend of Lilith's late mother.

Meanwhile, Tár, which would earn Blanchett another Oscar nomination in 2023, featured the actress as the celebrated first female director of a major German orchestra who faced accusations of misconduct. "I was so grateful, actually, to be in Budapest [filming Borderlands] because I met this incredible concert pianist who happened to have time because it was [COVID-19] lockdown, who took me into the Academy [of Music], who took me into the opera house," Blanchett says. "That's where I had my piano lessons and helped choose all the music, and I had my conducting lessons online on the weekend."

Blanchett also remembers what Curtis talks about. "When you're doing something as physical as this, you can only go up and down on a harness so many times before they have to turn the set around," she says. "There'd often be an hour where I had the time to sit down and look at the score. I always thought I was going to do needlepoint or knitting, but no."

Borderlands is set to open in theaters Aug. 9. Read more about the film at EW's Comic-Con cover story.