Nobody could say that Rachel Weisz was exactly typical of her profession. A Cambridge graduate who remains firm friends with noted no-brow Keanu Reeves? A former Neil Morrissey consort about to marry the brilliantly outlandish auteur Darren Aronofsky? A frequent fantasy heroine who effortlessly steps into Neil LaBute adaptations? A model-turned-actress who has won prestigious awards for stage writing? A woman who thinks Newry is the greatest place on earth? (To be fair, that’s because she loves to hang out with the Lynch acting dynasty.)
This bundle of contradictions is underlined by a remarkable trans-Atlantic resume. As one of the few British actresses to forge a screen career outside of a corset, she successfully moonlights as a blockbuster starlet in The Mummy, Constantine, Chain Reaction and the like, does her Eurobabe thing in Enemy At The Gates and Stealing Beauty and has still managed to find time for small, rather thankless projects such as The Land Girls and I Want You back home. There is, however, she insists, a vague method to her haphazard career.
“I think I’m just really passionate about storytelling,” she tells me. “That’s always my primary concern. I’ve never had a conscious career game plan. With the Mummy films, I just really found the character of Evelyn to be hilarious. But when you’re trying all sorts of different things, I’m not going to pretend that having a movie like The Mummy under your belt doesn’t help. It enables you to go after edgier projects. And I think that’s where I’m happiest. When I actually have to stretch myself and do a bit of work basically. So I do end up switching between very different budgets.”
As she strolls about her hotel suite today, you can easily see how she’s managed to maintain such a multifaceted screen identity. Though beautiful and incredibly delicate, she’s far too exotic, too darksome to be considered as a conveyor-belt English rose. And no wonder. Hailing from an Austro-Hungarian background that reads like a Dodi Smith novel, Rachel’s Jewish parents first came to England to escape the Holocaust. Her mother Edith became a noted Austrian psychoanalyst, while her father George, even more fantastically, is the humanitarian Hungarian inventor of respirators that produce their own oxygen and devices for detecting landmines.
“I never wanted to go into either family business, I’m afraid,” says the actress. “I settled on acting in my teens and before that I just wanted to be a spy or a detective. When I think about it now, my family is a bit like something out of a book, but my childhood was completely normal. Everybody thinks it must have been fascinating and it was. But I think every child finds childhood fascinating.”
Given Ms. Weisz’s socially aware lineage, her role in The Constant Gardener should come as little surprise. Essaying Tessa Quayle, an African-based political activist in a splendid screen adaptation of the novel by John Le Carre, she deftly manages to be earnest but never shrill, duplicitous yet never malevolent. Indeed, as the film unravels a dreadful conspiracy involving the use of human Africans as guinea pigs for pharmaceutical multi-nationals, her character’s development plays almost like an inverted femme-fatale narrative.
“Yes. That’s it,” she nods. “You think she’s a femme fatale but you should know better because she’s not wearing any make-up and is eight-months pregnant for half the movie! But I loved that she’s out trying to save people but she’s not Mother Teresa or anybody’s idea of an angel. She’s very flawed and she goes too far sometimes. It’s very unusual to get a female part like that. Generally you just get one adjective at a time – she’s strong! She’s feisty! And those are supposedly the good roles. I mean, have you ever met a woman in real life who is just one thing? It drives me nuts. So I was very happy to get The Constant Gardener.”
Shot largely in Northern Kenya, this complex and somewhat disquieting political thriller takes in marital discord, government corruption, murder and global conspiracy. Being a nicely bookish sort of girl, Rachel read and reread the source novel many times, but was equally drawn by the prospect of working with Fernando Meirelles, the hot-shot director of City Of God.
“City Of God was such an extraordinary film,” she practically sighs. “I had heard Fernando was in London seeing people for the role and I did a 24-hour round-trip from New York so I could see him, followed up by an impassioned letter! Fernando and I ended up consulting this battered old copy of the book on set. The prose is so seriously beautiful. Beforehand, I’d just really thought of Le Carre as something my dad reads. The screenplay helped too, of course. It had everything. It’s a thriller. It’s an unusual romance. And I’m really interested in people like Tessa, who can devote their lives to a good cause. I’d love to be so radically useful.”
While The Constant Gardener - in the nature of the global-political-thriller-romance - zips about from location to location (and, being from a Le Carre book, back to London quite a bit), inevitably filming in places like Nairobi provided the most memorable experiences.
“We filmed in a slum with a million people living in this one tiny area”, explains Rachel. “There was no running water, no electricity, no sanitation and very high levels of HIV and all kinds of disease. I’ve never witnessed poverty like it. How could I have? Tourists don’t go there. Whites don’t go there. The Kenyans that were working on the crew had never been. There’s a scene in the movie where all these children run up and start shouting ‘How are you? How are you?’ and hugging me. That wasn’t in the script. That’s what happened when we arrived. So it was an eye-opening and confusing experience. On the one hand, the most extreme poverty imaginable. On the other, the most warm, generous, hospitable, open-hearted people I’ve ever met. I couldn’t have expected it.”
Indeed, the entire cast and crew were so moved by what they witnessed in rural Kenya, they have since started The Constant Gardener trust fund from their own pockets.
“Some film productions use their locations in a very unethical way”, says Rachel. “But in exchange for allowing us to film in their community, we built them a school and a bridge. That was just payment for the film. We’ve set up the trust fund for future developments. But it’s not some publicity stunt cooked up by me and the producer. Everyone in the cast and crew was genuinely affected by what they saw. It’s the least we could do. My dad invented machines that save lives. I’m just a storyteller and an entertainer. And that’s fine. If I think I’ve entertained you then I can go to bed happy. But when you see children playing with footballs made from bunched-up shopping bags, it is important to do something.”
Next up for Rachel is The Fountain, Darren Aronofsky’s hotly anticipated follow-up to Requiem For A Dream. A twisty time-travel romance, the film sees Rachel back in familiar science-fiction/fantasy territory. Is she, I wonder, intent on spending her retirement years on the anorak convention circuit?
“I know. It’s strange,” she admits. “I’ve never thought of myself as a sci-fi person and often when you’re doing big special effects films, it doesn’t really feel like you’re making fantasy or sci-fi because so much of what you see on screen is added later. In a way I’m very unimaginative so I’m often shocked when I finally do see it. Oh, it is a science-fiction film after all. I think I do like the idea of the supernatural or places where normal rules are suspended. But The Fountain is all that but really raw and passionate. It’s a love story with myself and Hugh Jackman, and the fountain referred to is the fountain of youth. My character is dying of cancer and he’s trying to save her life. It’s set in three time zones – present day America, the distant future and in space. So from that point of view, it’s more sci-fi. Except it’s a Darren Aronofsky film.”
Of course, there is that. The Fountain did indeed provide an opportunity for Rachel to work with her recently betrothed. Meeting her today, seeing how lively she is, and listening to her talk about literature, I can’t help but think that the remarkable cult director Aronofsky is a rather better match for her than, say, Neil Morrissey. Happily, she’s plainly and very sweetly daft about Darren.
“We’ve been together four years and I’m very much in love with him,” she gushes. “He’s such a cultured, remarkable man. As a director he really pushes you. There were times when Hugh and I were crying, thinking we had given our all, and Darren would push us further. I know it sounds masochistic but it was fun. For an actor that’s heaven.”
So that’s what finally persuaded her to get hitched for the first time at the ripe old age of 34?
“Oh no,” she laughs. “It’s just that nobody ever bothered to ask me before. That was my first proposal.”
Now that’s really sci-fi.