Who’s a Hollywood Star? Where is She?
Rachel Weisz may be constantly on the red carpet but despite the oscar, blockbuster hits and showbiz relationships, she tells James Mottram that she actually leads a pretty ordinary life
Image – Corbis Outline
A WAITER ARRIVES WITH A DELICATE-LOOKING CHINA CUP AND SAUCER. “I think it’s my tea,” says Rachel Weisz, smacking her lips. “Very grand.” If this suggests the actress is awfully British, it’s also true that she exudes the glamour of 1940s Hollywood.
Not that she plays on it when we meet in a hotel in London’s Piccadilly. “Who’s a Hollywood star?” she jokes, when I tell her she is one, her head turning round in mock surprise. “Where is she?”
Weisz (pronounced ‘vice’) may be dressed down today in black leggings and a flower-print blouse, but it hardly dims her star wattage. She is naturally beautiful in a way that few super-toned, over-done Hollywood actresses really are. With her immaculate porcelain skin and feline green eyes, it’s little wonder she’s already fronted campaigns for Revlon and acted as inspiration to fashion designer Narciso Rodriguez.
Then there’s the CV: a canny blend of commercial hits like The Mummy and cred-gaining work like The Constant Gardener. Directed by Fernando Meirelles, the latter brought her a richly deserved Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2006 – further proof that, whatever she says, she’s a bona fide star.
“Marilyn Monroe was a star,” she counters.
“Everyone’s a celebrity now. If you go out with a TV presenter for 10 minutes, you’re a celebrity. There are so many nowadays. It doesn’t mean anything any more. I mean, I can walk down the street without being mobbed. There’s a myth [about celebrity] that’s been created and people don’t want it to be burst.”
It’s not hard to see why Meirelles calls her “a warrior”. Opinionated and outspoken, the 40-year-old Weisz has also combined movie success with motherhood – she has a four-year-old son, Henry Chance (named, apparently, after a character in a Peter Sellers film).
This ‘warrior’ image certainly fits with some of her more famous roles – the bitch-from-hell in Neil LaBute’s The Shape of Things or the unfaithful Southern Belle in Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights. Most recently compelling as a grief-stricken mother in Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones and the fourth-century astronomer Hypatia in the ambitious Agora, Weisz just doesn’t do weak and feeble. Playing strong women seems her stock-in-trade, although she dislikes the label.
“When people say ‘strong women’, I always think of women with dumbbells,” she giggles. “I don’t know what a strong woman really is. I would say that definitely after Fernando’s movie, I was offered a lot of feisty, strong characters.”
Still, as proved by her latest film, Rian Johnson’s kooky comedy The Brothers Bloom, she’s keen to avoid being pigeonholed. She plays Penelope Stamp, a lonely New Jersey heiress who suffers from epilepsy and hasn’t left her home state in 15 years. Quite rightly, Weisz calls her “an unusual, undefinable, multi-layered character who didn’t seem to me to be derivative of any other film”. She is the victim for the con-artist siblings of the title (Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo), and their mute sidekick (Rinko Kikuchi). Inevitably, Brody’s character falls for Penelope and wants out of his brother’s scams.
Weisz unquestionably delivers the standout performance, in what must be her most endearing character since the mother in 2002’s About a Boy. As Variety noted, she gives “an old-school screwball turn of hypercurious pep”, once again suggesting she is capable of channelling the Hollywood of yesteryear through her work.
“It was a role I wasn’t immediately thought of for,” she says. “I had to beg Rian on the phone for it.” She even raided her own wardrobe to find a pair of boots to fit her character. “As soon as I put them on, I felt like her. They were a bit clumpy. They gave me that funny little walk. So thank God for those boots!”
Her quirky character feels a world away from the cool intelligence that Weisz displays in person. But with the film taking its characters through Eastern Europe – the Czech Republic, Serbia, Montenegro and Romania – you can’t help but wonder whether Weisz felt a personal connection to the story. Her parents were Jewish immigrants – her father, George, from Hungary; her mother, Edith, from Austria. Both were brought to England before World War II to escape the impending Holocaust. Her mother would later become a psychoanalyst and her father an inventor of medical equipment, including a life-saving respiratory machine.
Despite this eclectic background, Weisz denies her character was inspired by her parents. “I’d say she’s more connected to my sister [Minnie], in that they are both pinhole photographers. Penelope makes cameras out of watermelons and my sister makes them out of buildings.”
London-born Weisz grew up in Hampstead; raised in a middle-class environment, her early years were comfortable. Her parents sent her to a series of private schools, including Benenden and St Paul’s Girls in Hammersmith, with dreams that their daughter might one day become a lawyer.
Weisz, though, was leaning towards a life in the arts. Despite a walk-on part in a school production of Alice in Wonderland, it was when she was accepted at Cambridge to study English that her acting career began in earnest. Together with two friends, she formed an experimental theatre group; they took a play, Slight Possession, to the Edinburgh festival and it won a youth theatre award. Still, admitting her parents “thought I was pretty crap” at the time, she didn’t rule out their choice of career for her. “There was definitely a Plan B if the acting didn’t work out,” she says. “I was thinking about going back to college to do a law conversion course.”
Not that there was any need. Slight Possession transferred to London’s National Theatre, and was seen by director Sean Mathias. He cast Weisz in a 1995 revival of Noel Coward’s Design for Living, and she was soon bestowed with the Critics’ Circle Most Promising Newcomer award. A year later, she began to gain attention on screen. Proving to Hollywood she was capable of handling a blockbuster, she featured alongside Keanu Reeves in the action-thriller Chain Reaction. At the same time, she showed that she was a fit for the arthouse crowd, appearing in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty (even stripping off – in the best possible taste, of course).
As for her personal life, Weisz has always been attracted to like-minded people. During her time at Cambridge, she dated Ben Miller, then head of the Footlights review and later one-half of comic duo Armstrong and Miller. Dubbed ‘the Trinity Hall heartbreaker’, Weisz stayed with Miller for two years after college, until she broke it off. Years later, she became a tabloid obsession for a while, when she dated actor Neil Morrissey. Their union lasted just six months, as women kept throwing themselves at the roguish Morrissey, slipping him their phone numbers.
There was even a brief relationship with acclaimed theatre and film director Sam Mendes before he married Kate Winslet, an interesting point given rumours that Weisz is being considered to play the main villain in the next James Bond film. With Mendes already attached to direct, it probably helps Weisz’s cause that she’s just finished working with 007 himself, Daniel Craig, on Jim Sheridan’s new psychological thriller Dream House.
Since 2002, though, Weisz has only had eyes for one director. “I was a big fan,” she says of Darren Aronofsky, her fiancé, “a huge fan of his film Requiem For A Dream.”
She met him on a press junket for The Mummy Returns. He rang her up to discuss possible future projects and they met for coffee just around the corner from his apartment in New York. They began dating around the time he was launching his long-gestating fantasy romance, The Fountain, in which Weisz played three characters, including Queen Isabella of Spain and a woman dying of cancer.
Describing him as a romantic, she has talked about how on their first date, he took her up in one of the rusty old fairground rides at Coney Island, telling her it was tradition to take your hands off the rail at the scariest point.
She thought it was an initiation test and, if she failed, she’d be dumped. “Seeing his films, you’d think he’s this dark, intense guy,” she adds, “but he’s anything but and is really good at life, very good at going to the park and having a good time.”
Next up, Weisz is slated to play Jackie Kennedy in an upcoming biopic directed by her partner. The script follows the iconic former First Lady in the four days after JFK’s assassination in 1963. She denies mixing business and pleasure has been a problem for them before. “There is, of course, a risk for the relationship. But when you work, you are in your ‘professional mode’ and how you are at home with your partner is a different part of you.”
Living together with their son in New York, Weisz and Aronofsky are engaged now, though there are no plans yet for marriage. “Darren and I are completely committed ‘until death do us part’, although we haven’t made it official with the paperwork,” she says. “It’s not for any political reason or that we’re waiting for this or for that, but maybe one day we will have an official ceremony.”
Whether they do or don’t tie the knot, such stability in her personal life has evidently given her the strength to experiment with her career. “I don’t feel in a box at all,” she concludes. “Right now, I feel like I’m roaming around all over the place.”
The Brothers Bloom is released in the UK on 4 June
