Are they the same actors they were then? Yes and no. Ms. Blanchett has never settled on any particular approach, though she did note that, “As a parent I’ve become a lot more economical.”

“That’s a great word,” Mr. Roxburgh said. “I don’t tie myself up in such knots anymore about trying to get something that is unattainable or ——”

“Perfect,” Ms. Blanchett said.

Both of them are busy with children and competing projects. Ms. Blanchett has three sons and a toddler daughter. Mr. Roxburgh has two sons and a daughter due in March. He has been occupied with his Australian television series, “Rake,” in which he plays an ethically challenged lawyer whose dissipation rivals Mikhail’s. (In Season 3, Ms. Blanchett had a cheeky cameo as his lesbian alter ego.)

She has several films on the go and is appearing at the Park Avenue Armory in the video installation “Manifesto,” in which she plays 13 characters declaiming on art and life. This is in stark contrast to Anna, who is given to wearied statements like: “I’m so bored. Bored and disappointed.”

But neither of them had any compunction about returning to Chekhov, first at the Sydney Theater Company and now again on Broadway through March 19. They spoke warmly about the richness of his characters and his writerly compassion for their follies and absurdities “They’re as slippery as we are as human beings.” Ms. Blanchett said. “They’re full of secrets and self-delusion.” Mr. Roxburgh agreed, though he cautioned that he had seen Chekhov plays that made him want “to put my eyes out.”

Both of them were excited to encounter a fresh version of a Chekhov play and Ms. Blanchett was struck by some of its contemporary resonances. The characters, she said, inhabit a political world in which “they’ve been lied to, they know they’ve been lied to, the people who are telling the lies know that they know, but everyone is pretending that the truth is being told.”