Retro BlackBook: Rachel Weisz, 2003

BlackBook covergirl Rachel Weisz is definitely in bloom for our May issue, but this isn't the first time we've enjoyed her charms. She was also on the cover for Spring-Summer 2003, meaning that she's joined our exclusive club of double cover subjects. That club includes the likes of Tilda Swinton (2005 Fall Fashion and September 2008), Christina Ricci (May 2008 and Winter 2001-2002) Benicio Del Toro (Winter 2000-2001 and Winter 2004), Cate Blanchett (October-November 2003 and October-November 2007), and Naomi Watts (Fall 2004 and December-January 2007). For more, see our full gallery of every cover from every issue of BlackBook; after the jump, take a trip down memory lane with our 2003 interview with Rachel Weisz.

Rachel Weisz is in a hurry. It is 5:15 on an afternoon that started sunny and is now overcast, and she is walking towards a Starbucks in uptown Manhattan. In 45 minutes, she will appear at a charity event with Alan Cumming to “read a bit of Shakespeare.”

Weisz, whose celebrity is largely on her comic turn in the Mummy movies, is a beautiful, edgy actress whose resume is spotted with false starts, but who is now on the verge of omnipresence. It is ironic that, after a decade of serious, thoughtful work, she became famous with a piece of childish populism, but it is what Rachel did next that makes her interesting. First came her sultry intervention as a single mother, catching Hugh Grant’s jaded eye in About a Boy. Coming soon are Confidence, a crime thriller with Dustin Hoffman and Ed Burns; Envy, a comedy with Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Christopher Walken; Marlowe, with Jude Law; and Runaway Jury, again with Hoffman, John Cusack and Gene Hackman. Most interestingly, there is The Shape of Things, in which she reprises her role from Neil LaBute’s stage play about the tangled spaghetti of relationships. Weisz plays Evelyn, an art student who entrances Adam (Paul Rudd). Eve tempts Adam, and he begins to change, raising a number of questions about the compromises people make. It is also about art: Evelyn, like the English artist Tracey Emin — whose work includes her unmade bed — trades in autobiography. In this kind of art, it is hard to know where the work ends and life begins.

Weisz is in Starbucks now, ordering a tall soy latte, with her cellphone clamped to her ear. She is taking the cup in her hand, and comparing Evelyn to Emin. Both are punky and anarchic. Both are modern artists. “And Tracey Emi uses her own life for her art. It’s like concrete art. She doesn’t paint a picture, she just assembles things from her life. Evelyn does think she’s as good as Tracey Emin. She’s a feminist and outspoken. That’s how she’s similar.”

“Art no longer represents something beyond itself. A painting on a canvas might represent a scene, or a sculpture might represent a person, but a bed just represents a bed. It’s like a breakdown in symbolism. That says something about society. I’m not sure what.”

This brand of art is also about celebrity. If the artist’s life is her art, and she is famous because of her art, celebrity becomes art. In this equation, fame, and what you do with it, becomes more important that what you did to become famous. Which is what happened to film stars a long time ago. Weisz blows across the lid of her coffee. “It’s become an extension of the work that celebrities have to do — create an interesting image. It’s obviously not really them, but we like to believe that it’s them. It’s just another false self, but we want to feel like we can read Hello! magazine and have these people in our living room, and feel as if we know them. But it’s another fiction posing as something real, which I guess is what Tracey Emin’s work is. It’s not quite real, it’s like reality TV. You’re actually looking at a fiction that’s saying: ‘I’m honestly and truly real, honestly, honestly.’” She laughs, “Promise, promise, promise I’m real. And of course it’s not.”

She steps to the edge of the curb and hails a cab to Broadway and Prince. “Everyone has this hunger for something that’s really real, but the only thing that’s going to be really real is…Well, I don’t know what’s real anymore.” Ask Rachel Weisz about her heroes, and she will mention Harry Houdini. “He could bust out of any jail, out of any lock , out of any situation. He was a very early poster boy using S&M as part of his appeal—chains and a greased body, wearing little underwear. Also he’s Hungarian and his surname was Weiss, so my fantasy has always been that he’s a long lost cousin.”
She also admires Jackie Onassis, and hopes to play her in a biopic (“We both have dead square faces.”) She is a fan of Elvis — all eras: “I like him just as much when he’s fat and drug-addled and being wheeled out and forgetting his lines and laughing. He’s the ultimate performer, in that nothing could get between him and his gift.” And she loves Dolly Parton. “She’s a great example of a brilliantly-penned self. You know, a created self. Is she even heterosexual? We don’t know. She’s a great creation, this blonde, happy lady.”

Weisz can tell you all this without accepting the notion that she, too, is becoming famous. “I kind of think of myself as an actress. Maybe I’m misguided, but I don’t feel involved.” There is, in the trajectory of Weisz’s career, a sense of inevitability. She was a model at 13, and a year later was offered a part in Richard Gere’s King David. She resisted, but took up acting while studying English at Cambridge University. Soon after, agents and film directors came calling: Bernardo Bertolucci (Stealing Beauty), Andrew Davis (for the Keanu bomb, Chain Reaction), and Michael Winterbottom (I Want You). A romance with the British television actor Neil Morrissey made her tabloid fodder, a feeling which abated only slightly when she dated Sam Mendes. She is now involved with the Pi director Darren Aronofsky, and moved to New York to be with him. “It’s very nice,” she says.

Her teens are usually viewed as a time of turmoil, but she affects ignorance of this. “I can’t even remember my teenage years. Normal healthy rebellious authority questioning adolescent, I guess. It’s a pretty normal story.” Getting kicked out of school? “Well, yeah, I didn’t burn it down or anything. I was rebellious as all teenagers should be.”

At Cambridge, the rebellion subsided. “I got into studying. I became, I suppose, a good girl. I really did have three of the best years of my life. Everyone always says ‘Oh, it’s a fucking ivory tower’ and, yeah, it is. It was great. It was just romantic, it was not totally real. You know, reading poems on a punt, floating down the river, and writing plays and being in theatre groups and taking plays up to the Edinburgh festival.”

“That was a sense of excitement that I always try to re-create. Actually, working in the theater with Neil on The Shape of Things felt like that.”

The taxi driver turns ‘round, and murmurs something incomprehensible. “Yes! Yes!” Weisz replies, shrugging.

Interviewers always mention Weisz’s skin. I ask her to describe it.

“My complexion? Well, if I was buying make-up I would say I was yellow. You can have yellow skin, pink skin, or beige skin, and I’m yellow-tinged which is Hungarian. A journalist would write ‘porcelain.’”

They write “porcelain”, “alabaster”, or “peaches and cream.”

“One is to eat, a nice dessert, one is a sculpture material. So I’m going to say yellow. Olive would be the nicer way. My dad’s Hungarian and he has olive skin. He has an Eastern European skin tone, not like British skin tone which would be more pinky.”

The cab swerves a little. “You know,” she says, apropos of not very much, “the Norse people, the Vikings, they went out and slaughtered lots of people and they wrote all these amazing ballads. To become a really famous warrior you had to write great ballads, and be really good at killing people on the battlefield. An then if you wanted to go down in history, you had to come up with a brilliant quip at the moment of your death, to deal with the situation, and the weapon that was killing you. It was pure improv. I guess you could rehearse a few to do with knives, but the ones that went down in history had these pure improv quips.”

That’s the ultimate performance. You’d never know what the audience thought. “Exactly! The ultimate creative act. Completely for history.”

What would your genius quip be?

“Under attack from a knife?”

Let’s say a baseball bat.

“A baseball bat! Oh, God, Americans love baseball. I would say something like: ‘Did you know baseball is based on an English girl’s name?”

You need to practice. Or hope for a different weapon.

“But do you know what I mean? Baseball’s based on rounders. Anyway, it’s not very funny.”

Weisz’s earliest memory is jumping over the banister into the basement of her family home. “It was kind of dangerous and I was told that I would die if it did it. And I did it, and no one saw me do it, and no one believed me, and I’m not quite sure it it’s true.” Her recurring dream is: “That I’m going to play Hamlet and I just realized that I haven’t bothered to learn the lines, and I have to make it up.”

The taxi pulls over. She gets a receipt for $9.

Inevitably, we talk about beauty. Weisz is often cast in ways which suggest that her beauty is dangerous.

She prods the question forensically.

“I get asked” — she adopts an American accent — “if you could change one thing about your body, what would it be? The answer is I’m happy with what God gave me”

“It’s scary for young women growing up. In the back of women’s magazines young women can save up money and go and change their shape, change their breasts, change their nose, change their forehead. There’s this great French modern artist, whose art is performing plastic surgery on herself…” [Orlan — whose face was reassembled using classical art as a reference].

“It’s very scary how women are made to feel.”

I ask whether she now has to consider how she represents women. She argues with herself, before concluding: “I don’t think politically about acting, not at all. I know that from The Mummy I’ve got a lot of young female fans. I’m aware that they exist. But hopefully everyone feels they’re living their lives are truly and as — I don’t want to say morally — as morally as they can.”

“So…I’m going to have to answer this question. No, I don’t get hung up about it. No one wants to be someone they’re not proud of. Aren’t we all trying to live our lives as if we are roles models, even if we aren’t? Doesn’t everyone?”

She strides off happily with her Arden Shakespeare in her hand.

Photography Mike Thomas.