Reflections
With
Rachel Weisz
Almost 25 years after The Mummy made her a star, RACHEL WEISZ is taking on one of her most ambitious projects to date: producing and starring – as twins, no less – in psychological TV thriller Dead Ringers. The Oscar winner talks to TYLER McCALL about acting against herself, the pursuit of pleasure, and keeping her private life just that
Over her 30-year career, Rachel Weisz has tackled many a challenging role. But in the upcoming remake of Dead Ringers, she is taking on two firsts: a television series and acting against… herself. “Day one, it was a mindfuck,” she admits, with a small laugh, of playing the identical twins at the center of the show. “But by the end, it just became like breathing.”
Weisz’s multifaceted character history encompasses everything from a former Soviet agent turned freelance assassin (in Marvel’s 2021 blockbuster, Black Widow) to confidante and lover to the queen (in rollicking period comedy The Favourite, 2018), and a grad student turned dedicated journalist (in the 2008 rom-com Definitely, Maybe), but, in person, she’s just Rachel, who lives a quiet, private life in New York with her family. Weisz is instantly warm when we meet, bundled up against the chill in an unassuming beanie and fleece. Nothing about her – except, perhaps, her preternatural beauty – would give away that one of Hollywood’s most eminent actors is sitting in the corner of this Brooklyn coffee shop.
Having that separation between Rachel Weisz, the actor, and Rachel Weisz, the person, has been important to her throughout her career. She doesn’t have a social-media presence – “I’m not very technologically savvy; I would be really crap at it,” she says – and she doesn’t say much publicly about her relationship with her husband, Daniel Craig, or their life together as a family. It isn’t an intentional strategy, but rather a personal philosophy.
“Oftentimes, with roles for WOMEN in the past, I’ve found them VERY oversimplified, and I think that’s CHANGING, which is really good”
“I suppose, for me, the words ‘private life’ mean just that: that you have a private life, which is the real-life stuff,” she explains. “And then there’s the fantasy stuff.”
To say that Weisz is good at the fantasy stuff would be an understatement. She won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2006 for The Constant Gardener and was nominated again more than a decade later for The Favourite. Still, finding roles to sink her teeth into hasn’t always been easy.
“Oftentimes, with roles for women in the past, I’ve found them very oversimplified, and I think that’s changing, which is really good,” she says. “The thing I’m looking for is complicated characters. It’s interesting, complex writing.”
“[Showrunner Alice Birch] and I were really INTERESTED in seeing women be massively successful and, equally, messed up… because PEOPLE are very, very complicated. We are never just ONE thing”
Enter Dead Ringers, in which Weisz takes on both Beverly and Elliot Mantle, identical twin sisters who appear as different in personality as you could imagine. Elliot is outgoing, easily bored and chaotic – Weisz describes her as “hungry for food, sex, experience” – while Beverly is shy, reserved and, per Weisz, “has a difficult relationship with pleasure”.
But it’s what the twins have in common that drives the series: both are gynaecologists, eager to open their own birthing center (Beverly, to provide better care to expecting parents; Elliot, to do research that perhaps isn’t totally above board), and both share a deeply, troublingly co-dependent relationship with one another that unfurls as the show progresses.
If it sounds familiar, it’s because Dead Ringers is a new iteration of the 1988 David Cronenberg film of the same name, starring Jeremy Irons – which itself is an adaptation of a 1977 novel, inspired by an article in New York Magazine about real-life twin gynaecologists Stewart and Cyril Marcus. Weisz, who was a fan of the film, had the idea to remake it with the lead roles gender-swapped to be women.
“Everybody in The Mummy was just BRILLIANT, and it was just some alchemical thing in it, that it had CHARM, and charm is such a strange thing – it’s either THERE or it isn’t”
“Everything’s in conversation with each other in different times, and right now, we’re in a particular moment – I think the show definitely is quite now, and quite future as well,” she says. This is evident from the first episode: Beverly and Elliot face multiple birthing crises in the hospital where they work, with devastating results that mirror current issues.
Rather than a movie, Weisz wanted to try the story as a television series. “You could explore it in this long-form way,” she explains. “I’d never done it, and I think it’s where some of the most exciting writing is happening.”
To get her idea off the ground, she needed a writer and showrunner. She loved what Alice Birch had done with her play Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, as well as the film Lady Macbeth, starring Florence Pugh, (this was in 2017, before Birch had written the smash-hit adaptation of Sally Rooney’s Normal People), and Weisz brought her on board to get a pilot episode written. “Her writing is miraculous to me, it just blows me away,” Weisz says.
In 2020, they took the project to Amazon, who immediately bought into the pair’s vision. “It was a straight-to-series order, which is a really big deal, and I was just learning as I went,” she says. “It’s been a long journey for me. It wasn’t the same as being offered a job with the script written – Alice and I developed the idea together and then she wrote an incredible script.”
Over the course of six weeks in early lockdown, Weisz joined the writers’ room alongside seven other women to plot out their take on the psychological thriller. While the source material is intense and the situations often twisted, it was important to both Weisz and Birch that the series have some dark humor, too. (It won’t surprise viewers to learn that Birch has served as a story editor on Succession, particularly after watching the second episode, which centers around a weekend retreat with an incredibly nasty, wealthy group.)
“It starts very grounded and quite tensely real and difficult. But then it goes off into what we call ‘near-fi’ instead of sci-fi; it becomes quite heightened,” Weisz tells me.
Throughout most of that process, Beverly and Elliot were developed as such distinct characters that Weisz didn’t consider she’d be the one to bring both to life. “I just imagined two people were going to play them,” she says. Still, she was more than up for the challenge when it arose: she would shoot an entire scene as Elliot first, acting opposite her scene partner and stand-in, Kitty Hawthorne, before heading back into hair and makeup to transform into Beverly. Then she’d act out the same scene with an earpiece in place so she could hear her own lines.
It may have been difficult to play two different characters in the same project, but with both Beverly and Elliot, Weisz was able to create what she’s been looking for in any single role: complexity.
“Alice and I were really interested in seeing women be massively successful and, equally, messed up,” she says. “The characters are complicated, and it’s not just like, good twin/evil twin – yawn, yawn – because people are very, very complicated. We are never just one thing.”
This is the throughline that ties Weisz’s three-decade career together: women who are allowed to be real human beings. She thinks back to the role that really put her on the map: Evelyn in 1999’s The Mummy.
“The idea of having these two WOMEN at the pinnacle of their professional lives, but their private lives are so DYSFUNCTIONAL, and so aberrant, and so bizarre… That CONTRAST – it doesn’t get any better”
“She was lots of things! She was feisty and prickly and innocent and goofy and clever and ballsy,” Weisz says, her affection for ‘Evy’ still very much present. “And she was a librarian in an action movie! The character and the writing were a real breath of fresh air.”
As it happens, we’re meeting just days ahead of the 2023 Academy Awards, where her Mummy co-star Brendan Fraser would go on to win the award for Best Actor. He’s in the middle of what some have dubbed the “Brenaissance” – and while it is too difficult for Weisz to pick favorites (she has co-starred with several nominees, after all), she’s been rooting for Fraser alongside everyone else.
“I’m really, really thrilled for him… that he’s had this new chapter,” she says. “And it couldn’t have happened to a nicer, nicer guy.”
While Weisz was aware that The Mummy had become a cult classic, she didn’t realize how beloved it still is by fans, especially millennials, until recently. Twenty-plus years on, the fondness she feels for the adventure epic that kick-started her trajectory to the heights of Hollywood is palpable.
“It’s beloved to me, too. I feel very much the same,” she says, lighting up as she recalls filming it. “When we were making it, we had no idea – we didn’t know if it was going to even sell tickets. Everybody in The Mummy was just brilliant, and it was just some alchemical thing in it, that it had charm, and charm is such a strange thing – it’s either there or it isn’t.”
That role has meant more to her career than just providing the ‘big break’ – it has also served as something of a reference point for what she still looks for in projects. “I definitely love the humor in The Mummy, for instance – and it couldn’t be more different to Dead Ringers. But I’m really drawn to that more and more now, looking for some fun. Women pursuing pleasure is really interesting to me,” she says. “Elliot is very much in that vein: she loves to eat, she loves to have sex. Female desire is really interesting, and I think we don’t get enough of that.”
With Dead Ringers, Weisz has carved out greater space to explore not just female desire, but the kinds of complexities that female characters deserve – and the kinds of complexities an actor like herself can find reward in exploring.
“The idea of having these two women at the pinnacle of their professional lives, but their private lives are so dysfunctional, and so aberrant, and so bizarre,” she says. “That contrast – it doesn’t get any better.”
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