Rachel McAdams
Interview By: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com
The lovely Rachel McAdams has returned! The Hollywood golden girl has been decidedly absent from the big screen after gigantic hits like Mean Girls, The Notebook and Red Eye shot her to stardom in 2004 and 2005. Taking a step back from the spotlight was a risk, but it just goes to show that McAdams is not slave to Hollywood. She’ll take things at her own pace, make her own decisions, and come out better in the long run. This month, she reenters the movies with a reinvigorated turn in the new mature relationship drama Married Life.
“The break was really great,” she says. “Married Life—I felt really inspired working with [director] Ira [Sachs]. He was very gentle and very kind and very supportive and I just felt reignited. Sometimes after a project you’re just completely spent but I was just ready to do more after this experience.”
McAdams enters a room with the same grace, poise, and romantic spirit we have come to know through her films. She’s soft-spoken and gracious, proud of her Canadian heritage, and genuinely excited to work on projects that inspire her. With her newly shortened, brown hair pinned up in loose curls, a stylish little-black-dress and a phenomenal pair of strappy heels, McAdams seems ready to once again take the movie industry by storm.
Her current look is almost completely opposite from the platinum blonde woman of the 1940’s she plays in Married Life. Kay is a young widow who finds herself torn between two older men—Harry (Chris Cooper), a smitten married man, and Richard (Pierce Brosnan), a fun-loving cad who also happens to be Harry’s best friend.
“I think her circumstance at that time is such that she’s not the marrying kind anymore, which is so sad,” McAdams explains of her character. “She’s young and bright and beautiful, but being widowed at 30 suddenly you’re an old maid. She sort of locked herself away in her house so I think that Harry really appeals to her because they’re both like little broken birds, I feel like. Like with broken wings and they’re trying to nurse each other back to health and they’re kind of hiding away from the world and I see them as a very secluded couple.
With Richard, though, a different side to Kay emerges. “I think that Harry allows her to forget that she is still a young woman and that she’s very passionate and that she loves to go out and dance and be less inhibited and I think that’s what Richard brings out in her,” she says. “He stokes the fire again and reminds her of her former self and asks for more.”
The complicated love triangle in which Kay finds herself is something McAdams tries to avoid in her own life. (She most famously dated her Notebook co-star Ryan Gosling, but the two have since quietly split.) “I don’t think I’ve been in the messy situation that Kay found herself
