“I really love the role”: the character Rachel McAdams has always dreamed of playing
Rachel McAdams has had a fairly impactful start to the year when it comes to human emotions.
She kicked things off with fear by starring in Sam Raimi’s gore-packed ‘stuck on an island’ smash Send Help in January, and then hit everyone’s sadness button by delivering a tearful eulogy to the late legends Catherine O’Hara and Diane Keaton at the Oscars.
No word as yet on which other basic human feels McAdams will go for next, she’s not due to make any comedies and her filming schedule currently only lists ‘Untitled Joseph Gordon Levitt AI movie’, which, aside from not being a very snappy title, doesn’t really shed any light on what genre it will be, other than probably sci-fi.
So instead, for now, if we want a heady hit of McAdams, we’ll have to dip into her sizable back catalogue, which fortunately is packed full of decent films and TV over the last 25 years and includes almost every type of project you could imagine. She got her breakthrough after being spotted in some early roles in her native Canada and forged a bit of a reputation for those early 2000s catty high school movies, like The Hot Chick and Mean Girls with Lindsay Lohan.
The latter was what really put her on the map, though, a global hit that prompted endless catchphrases, but also led to teens not letting other teens sit with them at lunchtime, which is always harsh, let’s face it. Not that it ever happened to me. Cough. Anyway, as if 2004 could have possibly got any better for the young McAdams, she then landed the lead opposite Ryan Gosling in the buckets-of-tears provoking The Notebook, a film which is perfect to watch on a sofa under a blanket, clutching a hot chocolate and saying things like “Just forget him, he’s not worth it, he’s a dick.”
It led to a couple of years of more hits for McAdams, like the Owen Wilson comedy Wedding Crashers, before she suddenly took a big step back from Hollywood for a good few years, returning in order to make everyone incredibly upset again opposite Eric Bana in The Time Traveller’s Wife in 2009, which is not as good as the book in any way whatsoever.
But it did lead to a very prosperous ten years for McAdams in which she stole the show in Guy Richie’s Sherlock Holmes films, joined a Marvel franchise in the shape of Doctor Strange and topped it all off with critical success too, receiving an Oscar nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actress’ in the Michael Keaton-starring Spotlight in 2015 and the same year appearing in the second season of HBO’s True Detective.
She’s now an actor with some $3.8bn in gross box office to her name, so are there any roles that she still hasn’t played that she’d love to? Well, kind of. Certainly, she would be at the front of the queue were Hollywood ever to remake one of the most-loved James Dean dramas of all time or 1939’s sprawling Gone with the Wind, telling Red: “I really love the role that Elizabeth Taylor has in (1956 Texan oil fields epic) Giant. Of course there’s (also) the Scarlett O’Hara and the classic ones that everyone wants to play.”
But she did step into the world of one of her favourite films of all time, a 1985 Canadian TV movie that she has often referenced as being a huge influence on her. McAdams added, “I just got to do an audiobook of Anne of Green Gables, which is one of my favourite fictional characters. I just bow down to her, she’s so phenomenal. It was so fun, a totally different set of skills, which I found out I actually don’t possess, but yeah you get to do things you’d never imagine you’d be doing.”
