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Rachel Weisz At Her Finest
By MARK SEAL
BLACK & WHITE PHOTOGRAPHY BY MARK ABRAHAMS
“It made me just want to do comedies,” says Rachel Weisz of the recent birth of her first child, a son, the implications of which, considering the actress’ extremely dramatic career, is surprising. But this being the season of goodness and grace, it’s the perfect metaphor: a move from darkness to light, from femme fatale to funny lady.
Therein lies a tale.
The raven-haired, porcelain-skinned actress gained fame, of course, for her talent at playing difficult women who revel in making mincemeat of men. First, there was her Broadway role as the conniving art student who dupes her lover in the play and movie The Shape of Things. Then, she won a best supporting actress Oscar for the studentturned-activist whose murder sends her soft-spoken, complacent husband spiraling toward doom in The Constant Gardener.
But motherhood sparks major life changes. For Weisz (pronounced Vice), who became a new mother with the arrival of Henry Chance Aronofsky in 2006, she says it made her want to “lighten up.”
“I was being offered all of these dramas, and I was like, ‘No, no, no. I want to do comedy,’” she says, calling from New York, having just put the baby to bed. “I wanted to ease back into work. I wanted to try something different than I’d ever done before.”
Mission accomplished. Fred Claus is a comedy in which she plays the girlfriend of Santa’s reprobate brother, a repo man who steals what he repossesses, played by Vince Vaughn. Then, in February, she’ll star in Definitely, Maybe, in which a political consultant tries to explain his impending divorce and past relationships to his 11-year-old daughter.
Weisz came from England to America on the wings of a dark character named Evelyn, who appears one day at a museum, carrying a can of spray paint. Encountering a young security guard (Paul Rudd in the Broadway production), she seduces him while subjecting him to a drastic makeover that eventually makes a mockery of his life.
“Pretty scary chick, huh?” Weisz asks.
The role was a long way from what she describes as a happy childhood in Hampstead, North London, where she grew up with one sister, Minnie, now an artist. Her Austrian mother, Ruth, was a teacher turned psychotherapist; father, George, was “an industrialist” who actually “manufactured what he invented; not in the garden shed.” When asked to describe her childhood, she says, “I loved climbing trees. We had a great tree in the garden and I used to climb it.”
Weisz learned lessons that would serve her well from her Hungarian grandmother, Kato, who was “very, very petite, very elegant, very chic, on a small budget,” she says. “She always had a manicure and heels. I’m not nearly as groomed as she was. She used to teach us how to eat properly. She could not stand it if we ever ate anything with our hands. We used to go to her house every Sunday. I remember it got a little out of control because we were eating olives, and she tried to make us eat olives with a knife and fork.”
But it was on the stage where Weisz felt most alive, first as a child in a nonspeaking part in Alice in Wonderland, then as Ismene in Antigone as a teenager. “I was burning to pursue this profession,” she has said.
She was modeling at 14, but went to Cambridge University to study English. There, the self-described shy girl blossomed. She and another student formed what became a two-person dance/drama company called Talking Tongues Theatre Group. Their specialty: extremely physical dramatic experimentation based on improv and Eastern European theater. One play, Slight Possessions, involved a stepladder. To commemorate the play, Weisz had a tiny ladder tattooed on her hip.
When asked about it now, she says, “I used to throw myself off that ladder in every play. The ladder was eight or nine feet high. We proceeded to throw each other around. If we bled, we thought that was really cool. We were really into it.” They won a Guardian Award at the Edinburgh Festival for the play. Back in London, she worked various jobs while auditioning for parts, including one stint checking coats and hats in a London restaurant, where, she says, she would dream that she was in a black-and-white movie in the Hitchcock mode. Soon, she was landing roles on British TV: a television movie Dirtysomething, then co-starring with Ewan McGregor in the 1993 BBC miniseries Scarlet and Black, and other productions.
Weisz graduated to the London stage, winning the Most Promising Newcomer of 1994 award for her role as Gilda opposite Clive Owen in a revival of Noel Coward’s Design For Living. This became her breakthrough, after the director, Sean Mathias, urged her to go deeper. “Stop trying to be so nice!” he told her. “Bring out the monster!”
With that, the future Oscar winner was born.
All she needed was the right script.
RACHEL WEISZ
Giving Her Best
| The best gift shse's given
“What comes to mind is, very recently it was my mom’s 70th birthday. And she always said she wanted a turquoise necklace because she’s got blue eyes. I went to an amazing store in New York called Edith Weber in the Carlyle Hotel. She has all vintage jewelry — very beautiful, beautiful shop. I found this great turquoise necklace and it was her birthday the next day. My girlfriend from London was here, and she took it back on the plane and then I got a taxi to pick it up from the airport and drive it to my mom’s. She got it on her birthday.”
The best gift she's received
“At Christmas, my mom always sends me these great nightdresses and pajamas from Marks and Spencer, which I know sounds silly, but they are the greatest. She gives them to me every year; I get a pair of pajamas and a nightdress, and I just always love them. I wear them all year. They’re really comfy and cozy.”
Where she loves to spend the holidays
“I grew up in England, and in England everyone celebrates Christmas, you go carol singing — you go around to people’s houses and sing carols, and you go to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. I do go home to celebrate Christmas with my mom. Christmas in London: On Christmas Day, everything stops, like a ghost town. Everybody is indoors having Christmas lunch, having turkey with families. People take it really seriously. It’s like full-on Christmas spirit, Christmas lights, and Regent Street. Everyone goes to watch the lights come on … and Hamleys Toy Store. It’s kind of a tradition; you go and look at the window dressing in Hamleys — it’s incredible. It looks like It’s A Small World, in Disneyland; it’s extraordinary things they put in the windows. It’s really festive in London.”
Where she's going this year
“Going to Mexico this year for Christmas and the New Year. I like to stay in the haciendas and then go to the coast. Henry is 16 months. It’s his first time to Mexico. He’s been to Brazil. We went on a holiday for a week to this little island … there are these islands just outside Rio, like a 45-minute plane ride from Rio. There are thousands and thousands of little islands.”
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When she debuted on Broadway in The Shape of Things in 2001, Weisz had already starred in American movies, including The Mummy, playing the alluring Egyptologist love interest to Brendan Fraser, and The Mummy Returns. During the press junket for The Mummy, she met Darren Aronofsky, a native New Yorker and director of edgy films like Requiem for a Dream.
They clicked as a couple in London. She took him to the Quality Chop House, “an old English restaurant where you can get things like cockles and mussels and jellied eels. And he was like, ‘Ayeee!’ I remember Bob Geldof was in the restaurant that night, wearing a big white suit.”
“I think I fell in love, he took a lot longer,” she says.
She showed him jellied eels; later, when she came back to New York, he showed her Manhattan from the Fuji photography blimp, letting her steer over Central Park. They were engaged in 2005.
Then came The Script, circulating as they do between agencies and actresses, an adaptation of John le Carré’s novel The Constant Gardener, that opens with the murder of Tessa Quayle, a fiery student-turned-reformer whose mysterious murder sends her complacent, doting, diplomat husband into a spiral of intrigue, near insanity, and … it takes quite a woman to do all of that to a man. “She was a very interesting, complex character, because she isn’t what she seemed,” says Weisz. “She’s set up to be one thing. You think she’s having an affair and she’s a floozy. And actually she is pretty noble and heroic. At the same time, she’s not an angel. She’s a bit of a pain in the ass.” Best of all, the story was about something. “There’s nothing wrong with pure entertainment, but it was actually about something real that was happening in the real world. It’s an important story and a heartbreaking love story. There were so many things in one. It was a thriller, love story, politically important, great character — it just had it all for me.
“It was one of those scripts that I read and thought, I have to do this, and I’ll do anything to do it,” she says. She began writing letters to the director, Fernando Meirelles. “I flew around the world to have a meeting. I was very tenacious about it.”
Once she won the part, she was off to Nairobi, Kenya, and its Kibera slum, the largest slum in sub-Saharan Africa, with more than one million inhabitants. Lake Magadi, with its flock of pink flamingos, is where the cast and crew lived in tents, as there were no hotels, no cities, nothing but open spaces … and need. She became immersed not only in the fictional story, but the sad facts of the country in desperate need. She had visited Kenya many years before as a tourist. This time, however, filming in the Nairobi slum, she underwent a transformation that is prevalent on the screen. She’d never seen poverty on such a massive level. But like her character, who felt most comfortable in the slum, where she could help people, Weisz says she felt most relaxed there, too. Then, it was on to Loiyangalani, where Samburu tribes have lived for thousands of years. It was a region with great beauty, but little facilities, especially for education.
True to the film’s spirit of activism, an idea was born.
“When we were filming in the shanty town, rather than give money as a location fee, we actually built things in the slum. We built a bridge, fresh water tanks, and restroom facilities, because there was no running water there and there was a badly needed bridge to access one side to the other. So it was kind of about giving back to the community in a really helpful way.”
She first saw The Constant Gardener at a screening with two executives from Focus Features and Universal, exiting the screening room excited that everyone “loved it.” Then came Oscar season 2006. Weisz was nominated for Best Supporting Actress, and the drumroll building up to the ceremony began. She was seven months pregnant by the time of the event, where the envelope was opened and Morgan Freeman said, “And the Oscar goes to . . . Rachel Weisz!” “I was just so pregnant!” she says, recalling standing up in her long, black Narciso Rodriguez dress and walking toward the stage, “the baby kicking away. I’d never even been to the Oscars. Then, to have it when you are so pregnant and having to run to the restroom every few minutes. It was just very surreal.”
It was also “pretty cool,” she says. “Because I can say to Henry that he went [to the Oscars] and that he won an Oscar.”
The reality of the situation they’d left behind in Kenya, however, haunted the cast and crew long after filming wrapped. Just as the film was about something, they felt they had to do something.
“The shanty town wasn’t a set. It was a place where we went with a tiny crew, like a documentary. We didn’t dress people in the background in costumes. We interacted with reality.” The film’s producer, Simon Channing-Williams, told his cast he thought the help should continue after the film wrapped. “And we all just said, ‘Yes.’ That was the spirit in the film. That was what the film is really about.”
The Constant Gardener Trust was formed, and helps in various ways. So far, the trust has helped build high-school-level educational facilities. “In Loiyangalani in the north, an area where there are no high schools,” says Weisz, “when they hit 11, that was it, their education is over. So we committed to it; Ralph Fiennes, myself, the producer, the director, John le Carré (who wrote the novel), and John Lyons (from Focus, the production company). We are all part of a trust and we raise money, being able to build a new classroom each year so that class can move up. So I come up with these fundraisers in New York. For instance, Cartier just recently did a big fundraiser and they gave me a huge amount of money.”
Activism was something new for Weisz. “You either are or you are not and I’m not. There are people like Tessa, my character. She would wake up in the morning and be absolutely driven to help people. I’m just a storyteller, I tell stories. Stories help a little bit, but there are people who are driven to do that and what a tremendous thing. You can’t fake it, you can’t say, ‘Well, I think I’d like to become an activist.’ You completely just are. These people are driven and incredible people.”
I mentioned that something of Tessa’s spirit obviously remained in her.
“I was inspired by her, but I didn’t like have a total personality change forever,” she says. “I would be a lunatic if that happened every time I played a part. You know, you get back to your self.”
For Weisz, it was The Fountain, released in November 2006. It was originally to star Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, but eventually starred Hugh Jackman and Rachel Weisz. She has called The Fountain a fable about love, death, and loss, set in three time zones: 16th-century Spain, present-day America, and distant-future deep space. It also took Weisz into what many in Hollywood consider a dangerous realm: The film was directed by her fiancé, despite the Hollywood adage that a director working with his or her sweetheart is an invitation for trouble. “Everyone warns you against it,” she says. “But I loved it. I like to collaborate with him on making a life, and it was great to collaborate with him on his movie.”
Now that she’s done comedy, and become involved in charity, she’s ready to return to her forte. It’s tempting to say that as a year after her delivery grew into two, the ladder on her hip began calling her to do something “scary and hard.” But comedy, she insists, was scary enough. “Because I had not really done comedy, I’d done mainly drama,” she says.
Next up is an adaptation of the Alice Sebold novel The Lovely Bones, the bestseller which begins with this line: “My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered on December 6, 1973.” Weisz stars as Abigail Salmon, devastated by the loss of her daughter, Susie Salmon, who is murdered but continues to observe her family on earth after her death.
“No, there’s no comedy in that,” says Weisz. “I did comedy in the spring and summer and I got it out of my system a little bit. I’m ready for drama again.”
Watch out, world … Rachel Weisz wants to get serious.
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