Cate Blanchett Reveals Trick She Was Taught to Help Cry on Command: 'Pull a Nostril Hair'

Cate Blanchett is sharing some tricks of the trade.

On Thursday, the Academy Award-winning actress appeared on the popular YouTube series Hot Ones with host Sean Evans, where she talked about a trick she was once taught to help cry on the stage.

Around the 12:30 mark of the episode, in which Blanchett, 53, answered questions about her work and career while eating increasingly spicy hot wings, the actress realized that using hot sauce to help open tear ducts is "actually an amazing trick" as host Evans warned her to "be careful."

"An actor told me, an older actor, a stage actor, told me 'You know, if you need to cry, you turn upstage and pull a nostril hair,' " Blanchett told the host. "And it works."

"But now I know if you turn upstage, you've got a little bit of hot sauce on your finger, and then, yeah, you can play Greek tragedy," the TÁR actress added.

RELATED: Cate Blanchett Did Her Own Orchestra Conducting in TÁR — Not the 'Lip-Syncing Version of It'

Blanchett, who plays fictional world-renowned composer Lyida Tár in her new movie, told Evans during her Hot Ones appearance that she pretends nobody is watching her when she acts.

"It's the way I deal of the anxiety of it, because you have to have a sense of, a lack of consequence, you know what I mean," she said during the show. "So if you're gonna embarrass yourself, and acting is embarrassing a lot of the time, you embarrass yourself in public."

First We Feast/YouTube

"You really do have to pretend that no one is going to see it and frankly, that's often the case with the things I do," Blanchett added. "But hopefully not with TÁR."

In the new movie, Blanchett's EGOT-winning character, widely hailed as a genius and a trailblazer for women in the industry, sees her career upended amid sexual misconduct accusations.

To make the many performance and rehearsal scenes realistic, Blanchett trained with a coach to learn how to conduct an orchestra herself rather than rely heavily on movie-making trickery.

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"I wasn't doing the conducting lip-syncing version of it," she said with a laugh during an Oct. 3 press conference for the film at The New York Film Festival.

Courtesy of Focus Features Cate Blanchett in TÁR

"We've all seen those movies about painters, about writers and musicians and go, 'Please, God, don't turn the canvas around because I know that you're not really a painter.' We didn't want to do that version of it," she said. "It was really important to me ... that we had to be able to truly hold our own with the musicians who were asked to act. As actors we had to become, as close as possible, musicians."

Blanchett, who also plays some piano and speaks in German periodically throughout the movie, said she listened to one of the film's pivotal symphonies "inside out" and "nonstop, 24/7 for a year" to prepare.

RELATED: Cate Blanchett Is an Accomplished Composer Fighting an Inner Battle in Intense Trailer for Tár

"[Then] I felt that I could begin to approach the role," she added. "Because there was something contained within the symphony itself and learning to read that score in a vertical as well as horizontal way that I began to understand who she was and her terrifying mechanisms. It was through music."

TÁR is playing in theaters nationwide now.