Rachel Weisz’s fond recollection of her acting beginnings: “Crap and more crap”
We are about to be seeing a lot of Rachel Weisz, quite literally in fact.
If rumours are to be believed about her upcoming Netflix series, Vladimir, which looks saucier than freshly made pasta sauce, we will see her enthusiastically romping about the place with the much younger fellow British actor Leo Woodhall and repeatedly breaking the fourth wall, Fleabag style.
Weisz is one of those actors that you forget about for quite a while and then see her pop up in something and think ‘Oh, yeah, she’s really good’, but you certainly don’t consider her as one of Britain’s most successful stars of this century, which she is with a total box office gross of over $3.5billion, a number that came thanks to several blockbusters she made in the late 1990s and early 2000s, such as The Mummy, The Mummy Returns, Runaway Jury and the Keanu Reeves fantasy action Constantine.
2006 was a particular high point for Weisz, due to The Constant Gardener, the John le Carré thriller co-starring Ralph Fiennes that earned her the Oscar for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ along with a Golden Globe, after which she would go pick up another Oscar nomination for her part in Yorgos Lanthimos’ 2017 film The Favourite.
However, things weren’t always as rosy for her, especially in the early days when she was having to say yes to any TV job or movie she could get a part in, describing them eloquently to The Guardian as “Crap and more crap. I was crap, it was crap”.
Once she’d stolen the show in Bernardo Bertolucci’s lush drama Stealing Beauty in 1996, however, in a role she described as “a small part starkers by the pool” she began to get noticed and picked up for movies like her first film with Reeves, the critically-panned action sci-fi Chain Reaction, that gave her “My own flat, my own car, a comfortable life”.
Then followed The Mummy movies in a storm of bugs and ancient curses, and Weisz went on a ten-year run that included fantasy fare like Eragon, sci-fi movies like Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain with Hugh Jackman and even a lamentable Christmas comedy in the form of Fred Claus opposite Vince Vaughn.
Pretty much every major Hollywood genre ticked off, and perhaps it was unsustainable, as the next decade saw her take on much less obviously commercial films once she’d appeared in Oz: The Great and the Powerful and Jeremy Renner’s The Bourne Legacy.
Her role in Marvel’s 2021 smash Black Widow aside, she appeared in several independent films, including another Lanthimos film, The Lobster, plus a drama called My Cousin Rachel and the eyebrow-raising Disobedience opposite Rachel McAdams, and most recently was Golden Globe nominated for her performance in Dead Ringers, a psychological drama on Prime Video in which she played a set of twin gynaecologists trying to change the way women give birth.
She’s now somewhat surprisingly signed up to go back to The Mummy franchise after a more than 20-year gap for a fourth film with Brendan Fraser, although that’s not due in cinemas until some time in May 2028, between which she also has a film with Succession’s Matthew Macfadyen on the way called Seance on a Wet Afternoon, which has the brilliant premise of a psychic getting her husband to kidnap a child so that she can ‘psychically’ solve the case.
