“Like watching Mick Jagger do Shakespeare”: the 1986 performance that inspired Rachel Weisz’s career
Every actor can trace their interest in becoming a star back to a specific performance, which might not be a particularly well-known one, or may involve someone unexpected, but there’s always a certain actor who will have stirred something within them and encouraged greatness.
Inspiration can come in so many forms, of course, and you never know which actor another star is going to pick out as their driving force, like, for example, it was the young David Bradley as Billy in Kes that lit the fuse for legendary actor Daniel Day-Lewis, while Meryl Streep cited seeing Robert De Niro in Taxi Driver as a motivating force who inspired her to get off the stage and try her hand at Hollywood, and Emma Stone, surprisingly, cited her biggest influences as male comics like Charlie Chaplin and John Candy.
Luckily for Rachel Weisz, it was someone she’d get to work with later in life, so in a way, her acting career came full circle.
Before she was an actor, she was a teen model, which naturally led Hollywood to come knocking, and after a few TV appearances, she made her film debut in 1994 with a brief role in Death Machine, but by the end of the decade, she was a bona fide star, appearing alongside Brendan Fraser in the hit 1999 film The Mummy, since then, establishing herself by working with everyone from Yorgos Lanthimos to Peter Jackson, spreading herself across offbeat productions and more commercially accessible ones, like Marvel’s Black Widow.
Refusing to box herself into any specific genre, Weisz has always led with her intuition, and she can thank the boldness of a certain performance for always inspiring her to be brave.
When she was a teenager, newly initiated into the world of modelling, she was taken to the National Theatre to watch a play with her mother, specifically, for a production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, which had Bill Nighy playing Edgar.
It was 1986, and by this point, Nighy had already established himself well in the theatre, but for Weisz, this was a totally new and exciting discovery, telling Vogue, “It was like watching Mick Jagger do Shakespeare”.
She revealed that he “didn’t know it then, but he became a sort of mentor”. Fast forward to 2011, and the pair would star alongside each other in Page Eight by David Hare, allowing Weisz to share the screen with someone who’d inspired her to get there in the first place.
From there, she found the courage to take to the stage herself, forming the group Talking Tongues as a way to put on performances when she was a student in Cambridge. “I kept auditioning for parts and not getting them. On the whole, I just wasn’t the star, so I thought, ‘Fuck it, I’ll do my own thing’,” she said, the boldness of Nighy’s performance clearly inspiring decisive action in her, as she added, “And then you’d get five people turning up for the performance. Oh, they were great times.”
