The Independent - May 26, 2001

Interview Rachel Weisz: Mummy’s girl

by Jonathan Dyson

It could be confusing. Rachel Weisz is currently playing two characters, both called Evelyn. “Evelyn is Eve really, there’s lots of biblical references. It’s in a tradition of religious writing where people put morality under the spotlight to show how bad the world can be. It’s about moral relativism really, how we live in a world without any values any more, where religion has fallen apart, where families have fallen apart …” That, then, would be Evelyn, the modern-day postgrad student in American wunderkind Neil LaBute’s excoriating new play The Shape of Things? Rather than the librarian- turned-superhero-treasure-hunter playing opposite Brendan Fraser in The Mummy Returns, the sequel to the surprise 1999 horror hit The Mummy?

Well, OK, it’s not that confusing, particularly when it’s so apparent which of the two projects the 30-year-old London-born actress finds more intellectually and artistically stimulating. And which she would rather spend our lunch talking about.

We meet in La Strada, a modish and bustling new Italian restaurant in Islington, north London, seconds away from the rehearsal rooms where The Shape of Things is, she assures me, taking shape, prior to its opening at the Almeida Theatre two weeks hence. Weisz (pronounced “vice”) is slighter and less striking in real life than she is in photographs or on screen. The camera brings out a raven-haired vampish beauty (for which she can thank her east European emigre parents: Austrian mother, Hungarian father), counterpointing her inescapable good breeding and very English poise.

Perhaps it is breeding that explains her apparent embarrassment when I mention that posters for The Mummy Returns - already topping the US box office charts having taken $100m in just nine days - have been plastered up all over London in advance of its nationwide UK release. How does she feel about this? Does she get a lot of a hassle for who she is, as her box-office status rises? “Not really, I’m small-fry,” she insists. “And I don’t have a big celebrity life, I don’t really do the party circuit. People go to those parties deliberately in order to be photographed. I see my friends, or go to the pub. Celebrity is a choice, totally, but no one wants to hear that.”

Editors of certain glossy magazines and gossip columns might be forgiven for expressing surprise at such comments. Weisz has been pursued by them, both because of her looks, and the string of high- profile boyfriends, including actor Neil Morrisey and, most recently, American Beauty director Sam Mendes, from whom she has just parted. But she doesn’t seem to have spurned the media’s attentions: she wasn’t, presumably, forced at gunpoint to appear on the front of the June issue of Glamour magazine, to name but one example.

“What I don’t like,” she says, briefly warming to the celebrity issue, “is when they follow you round where you live [Primrose Hill, north London]. I was ranting to my mother about this guy who took a picture of me walking to the shop in an old pair of trainers and looking, well, like a normal person, and the Daily Mail put it next to a picture of me at the Baftas where I presented an award in a Gucci dress and all done up. I was on the phone to her saying, `God, this is outrageous,’ and she said, `You can’t choose when you get photographed, that’s what happens if you go into that arena. Don’t present a Bafta, don’t do anything, if you don’t want it.’”

The conversation with her mother is perhaps significant. Despite a respectable Jewish upbringing in Golders Green, Weisz first found fame aged 13 in the world of modelling, and at 14 was offered a role in Richard Gere’s King David. At which point her parents - inventor father, psychotherapist mother - apparently had second thoughts and packed her off to London’s private St Paul’s Girls School. It was only while studying English at Cambridge that she was able to return to the “arena”, winning a Student Drama Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival for a series of semi-improvised pieces performed with fellow student Sacha Hails under the direction of David Farr. “It was the best time of my life,” she tells me, “running round the festival with flyers trying to get people to come and see you. And if you got 10 people in, you were doing really well. It was so exciting, you’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose.”

The Edinburgh award led to a transfer to the tiny fringe Gate Theatre in London, and in turn secured Weisz her first agent. Subsequent, but infrequent, stage outings have regularly won plaudits, in particular her work with Sean Mathias: making her sensational West End debut at the age of 23 in his radical revival of Noel Coward’s Design for Living, and working with him again in 1999 as the traumatised Catherine in Tennessee Williams’ overheated Southern psychodrama Suddenly Last Summer.

The Shape of Things, then, is a welcome return to the medium in which she says she is happiest. “I deliberately stopped doing film a few months ago because I wanted to do a play,” she says. “I just knew it was time, this is where my heart is, and it had been two years since Suddenly Last Summer. If I’d been away filming when the audition for The Shape of Things was on I would have missed it. You have to make a conscious decision to get off the merry-go-round if you want to do theatre, it’s very tempting to just keep saying yes to film projects. And when Neil’s play came along, I just wanted it more than I can tell you.”

Weisz is reluctant to go into details about the play other than to say that it picks away at the shifting relations of two sets of couples on a US campus. Weisz’s co-stars, Paul Rudd, Gretchen Mol and Fred Weller, are all experienced American stage actors which, Weisz says, makes her feel doubly honoured. “It’s a very American play, I’m sure they would have preferred an all-American cast … Neil is such a brilliant writer,” she adds, “he’s a truly original voice, his writing makes my hair stand on end. He has this way of getting inside bad people’s skins, not people who are murderers but people who are just walking the street, people who might be sitting in this restaurant.”

The sort of people, indeed, who have appeared in previous stage and screen work by the gifted 39-year-old New Yorker and, intriguingly, practising Mormon. LaBute’s first film, In the Company of Men (1997), told the story of two thirtysomething executives who set out to get their own back on the women who they believe have messed up their lives, with breathtakingly savage results.

Given Weisz’s obvious pleasure and success at working on stage, it might seem surprising that she hasn’t done more theatre, particularly since, Mummy apart, her films, though numerous and varied, have had limited commercial and critical impact. Weisz made a promising big- screen debut in 1996 as Miranda, the sexually rapacious foil to Liv Tyler’s vacillating virgin in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Stealing Beauty, and two years later turned in another finely judged performance as the psychopathic hairdresser Helen in Michael Winterbottom’s underrated I Want You. But these have been the exceptions. What might have been a breakthrough Hollywood film, playing opposite Keanu Reeves in the hi-tech action-adventure Chain Reaction (1996), deservedly disappeared without a trace, as did the interminable Hungarian family saga Sunshine (1999), in which she was bounced off the screen by Ralph Fiennes in full flow. A more recent epic, Enemy at the Gates, about the siege of Stalingrad in the Second World War, in which Weisz starred alongside fellow Britpackers Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes, was less than convincing. Ditto this year’s off- target comedy thriller Beautiful Creatures in which she played murderous ditzy blonde Petula.

The list of, frankly, forgettable films also begs the question of why directors keep knocking at her door. Is it simply her looks? It is her personality? Face to face across the seared tuna and mushroom risotto, she makes the most charming of interviewees, self-effacing, irreverent, extremely intelligent, and apparently as interested and concerned about you as you are about her. It’s an amusing irony, not lost on Weisz, that her eventual breakthrough film was hardly her finest hour, but somehow seemed to tap into a collective cinema- going need for another utterly escapist Indiana Jones-type vehicle. And there is an undoubted chemistry between her and co-star Fraser. “I did it originally,” she says, “because I liked the script. I thought Evelyn was a really funny character, a librarian in an action movie, it was a good part for a girl, a part that wasn’t just eye candy. It reminded me of those old black-and-white Saturday morning matinee films, like Zorro, it had that kind of style. And you have to be realistic. Most people want to be entertained. You can’t be snobby and say, how dare they want to go on a rollercoaster ride and have fun.”

Weisz claims doing Mummy is not part of a grand plan to try to make the superleague. “Having success with something like this means you can use your name to attract money to do more low-budget and interesting things which are more to your taste.” This worthy sentiment would presumably not apply to one of her two confirmed new film projects, a version of Nick Hornby’s bestselling novel About a Boy, in which she will co-star with Hugh Grant. But it certainly does to the other, the interesting-sounding Marlowe, about Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, which is to be directed by John Maybury, who won plaudits for his dissection of another great artistic outsider and homosexual, the painter Francis Bacon (Love is the Devil, 1998). Marlowe is one of the first films to come out of Natural Nylon, the production company set up by Jude Law and friends. Law had originally wanted his wife Sadie Frost to play the lead female role, only to be told by the money men, so rumour has it, that she wasn’t big enough. The compromise? Former co-star Weisz, who, thanks to Mummy, is now eminently bankable. “It makes the Sixties look like candyfloss,” says Weisz of the film.”It’s as dirty as hell, a real antidote to Shakespeare in Love.”

And talking of great dramatists … a representative of the Almeida has appeared at our table. The rehearsal room beckons. Mr LaBute is itching to wrestle with his demons again. A final cigarette, a cup of Earl Grey tea.

Is Weisz happy then, careerwise and in her personal life, now that she has reached the milestone of 30? Is she less/more driven? Does she have a secret strategy? And is it working out? “Being 30 is fantastic,” she says. “I wouldn’t do my 20s again, no way. My career was great, but everything else, being young and worried, all that stuff. I think as you get older things get easier, you know what you want, and you’re probably a bit less driven. I think I must have been very driven, although I’ve never been one of those people who just works. I’m probably starting to think about children, although I’m not in a relationship at the moment so I can’t have them yet. I’m just really lucky … and I’m really, really excited to be in this play.”

© 2001 Independent Newspapers UK Limited