Rachel McAdams’ most disastrous audition: “Please shut your mouth”
Rachel McAdams is one of those actors who usually herald the arrival of a good film. She steals the show in The Notebook, acting circles around Ryan Gosling to an embarrassing extent. As Regina George in Mean Girls, she set the template for high school bully characters that is still being followed today. Also, and this is purely a personal bias, but she is great as Irene Adler in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes. Absolutely tragic that they killed her off so early in the sequel.
All that to one side, McAdams is great. Unfortunately, being great doesn’t always mean you get the part. She missed out on the Zach Braff film The Last Kiss due to scheduling conflicts. There were also a string of other famous films that she turned down in the mid-2000s, which would have all looked very different had she agreed to come aboard. She was supposedly up for the role of Pepper Potts in Iron Man, the part ultimately played by Gwyneth Paltrow. No offence to Gwyn, but McAdams would have blown her out of the water.
According to the star herself, there was one audition she had that went so badly that she was in no position to turn anyone down. In an interview with Access, she revealed that she had once gone up for a part in a different language, but things didn’t quite work out the way she planned.
“I had to speak French. I had to ad lib in French,” she said, pointing out that, while she is in fact Canadian, she crucially isn’t French-Canadian. “The guy said ‘Ok, let’s do some improv!’ And I had learned, you know, the three French lines, and that took me all night long… all I kept saying was ‘s’il te plaît’ and ‘ferme ta bouche’… all I could remember was ‘please, shut your mouth’”. She didn’t name the part she was up for, nor the name of the production, but it’s safe to assume that she didn’t get it.
Languages can be a huge barrier in an actor’s career. Ana de Armas, who grew up in Cuba as the child of Spanish immigrants, only learned to speak English for her part in the Eli Roth thriller Knock Knock. Similarly, Antonio Banderas didn’t learn English until he was a major star, and we’ve all seen those bloopers of Jackie Chan saying completely the wrong word in western movies. Still, these are all examples of actors who overcame an issue with language. McAdams wasn’t so lucky.
Ironically, France and its native tongue have cropped up numerous times in McAdams’ career. She appeared in the Woody Allen film Midnight in Paris, playing a character who is obsessed with the city and its European charm. In 2012, she starred in a Brian De Palma movie called Passion, which was an English-language remake of a film originally released in French. These are either mad coincidences or somebody was playing a cruel trick on her.
She might not have learned enough French to get a job, but Rachel McAdams seems to have maintained a strong enough relationship with the country to at least interact with it from a distance. Maybe we’ll get her in a remake of La Haine one of these days, but then again, maybe not. Either way, c’est la vie.
