There’s quite a lot of blood. There’s really quite a lot of blood in Dead Ringers, but it’s not the blood of bullet holes or stab wounds, or any of the other violences one might expect in a dark psychological thriller like this. It’s blood on knickers and operating tables, and smeared on silk shirts, and the blood as a baby’s head crowns – the bloods of birth and loss, guttural screams, and in the middle of it all, Rachel Weisz, twice.
In David Cronenberg’s original 1988 film, a grisly examination of the relationship between the physical and mental self, Jeremy Irons played twin gynaecologists whose dubious ethics led to all manner of horrors. In this gender-swapped adaptation, in which Weisz stars and exec-produced, she plays those twins identical in every way but character. Dr Beverly Mantle is the shy moral introvert, whose love affair with a patient triggers a psychic unravelling between the sisters, while Elliot is a modern mad scientist, hungry for meat, drugs, conflict, godliness, sex. What could come off as a soapy trick, in Weisz’s Oscar-winning hands becomes camply surreal, uncanny, seductive, a little perverse – joy.
She meets me today from the study in her Brooklyn home after the usual “morning chaos” of getting her teenage son (with director Darren Aronofsky) and four-year-old daughter (with husband Daniel Craig) out of the house: “My stepdaughter took my littlest one to school, thankfully, but still,” she takes a dramatic spoon of porridge, “chaos.” A refined sort of cashmere chaos, but yes – she has a young family, and a large career which has recently encompassed both Marvel movies and independent cinema, and a marriage which, despite its quiet domesticity, reflects such glamour it feels almost blinding. Navigating all this does feel like it might require a certain level of splitting, or at least one more Rachel Weisz.
New York has been her home since 2002, but she grew up in London and has commuted, basically, “backwards and forwards since my son was born 16 years ago. Maybe I’m deluded, but I still feel pretty in touch with England – it will always be home.” Her late parents came to Britain from Austria and Hungary as child refugees just before the Second World War. She chuckles. “They saw it as this incredible country that had welcomed and saved them. My father always used to say, with a very, very strong Hungarian accent, ‘Buy British.’ And I think of myself as the child of immigrants, for sure.” They sent her to a private girls’ school, where she excelled, until she didn’t.
There is a grainy clip online of a 1980s episode of the breakfast show, Good Morning Britain, in which Weisz, then 14, is interviewed about having turned down a part in a Richard Gere film. “I remember that day well. What the fuck was I doing there? I guess my mum had arranged it. I looked like a little rabbit in the headlights, didn’t I?” In the clip she is upright and wary, and quite clearly exactly the same person as the one sitting before me today, a person already formed, already taking themselves very seriously. “Yes I was quite serious. And then I became very serious about rebelling. I did everything pretty seriously.” She was expelled from school soon after that breakfast show, “due to a good healthy adolescent rebellion. Now I’m much more respectful,” she promises. She still has the flyers for the warehouse parties she frequented in those rebel days, a kind of totem, proof of propensity to defy.
At the next school she joined, the headmistress told her she wasn’t allowed to apply for university as she was “a disgrace to the school”, but another teacher took her aside and promptly changed her life. “It was that moment – having a grownup, who was very stern, but who had a kind of magic to her. And she said – I think you can do this. It was like… being offered a different role.” She got into Cambridge University, where she co-founded a theatre group, and her acting career took off soon after, with notable successes being her first Hollywood film, The Mummy (with Brendan Fraser) and in 2006 an Oscar for her role in The Constant Gardener. “I do wonder sometimes what would have happened if we’d carried on with that theatre troupe. That is definitely a daydream I’ve had. If we’d continued to write stories in the very particular way that we did – a certain kind of physical, expressionistic theatre, pretty funny and radical and cheeky and mischievous. Yeah, I do wonder about that.”
Traditionally, as an actress gets older, the parts they’re offered shrink, but over the past decade Weisz, now 53, has gone the other way – she’s moved away from the love interests to become, well, the interest itself. She’s taken on darker, odder, or more nuanced characters, like Short Sighted Woman in The Lobster (set in a world where one must find a romantic partner in 45 days, or else be transformed into an animal), and Ronit in Disobedience, where she played a lesbian returning to her Orthodox Jewish community, and opposite Olivia Colman in period romance The Favourite (which brought another Oscar nomination). It seems no coincidence that in many of these recent pieces (including Dead Ringers) she plays queer women in complicated erotic relationships, roles which have brought a new kind of gravitas as well as a new kind of audience – the satirical site Reductress ran a wistful stock photo headlined, “Woman Cozily Cupping Mug Secretly Thinking About Getting Absolutely Railed by Rachel Weisz”. Later, discussing scripts, Weisz tells me, “I swing both ways,” and I note her queer fans will be delighted to hear that. She doesn’t smile. “I meant,” she says, drily, “between a producer and an actress, obviously.”
How conscious was the choice, to pivot to transgressive women’s stories? “Interacting with a man has a different dynamic to interacting with a woman – both are human and interesting and worthy of storytelling. But, I just felt like I hadn’t done much of the latter, and it seemed a rich kind of arena to go and roam, and explore.” She thinks. “Women alone talking to women has a very different feeling. Plus, I love the company of women. And so I guess I’m interested in stories about them.” Besides, she says, “The history of cinema has seen a lot of heterosexual love stories and buddy movies, which I’ve loved. But I want more female buddy stories, too. Don’t you?”
Dead Ringers, though, is not so much female buddy story as female co-dependence story, complicated by blood and ethics. “The sisters are so tightly intertwined that you see that co-dependence as highly functioning. They’re at the top of their games, but in their private lives they’re massively dysfunctional. They can’t live without each other. And then – you see them being broken apart.” Her eyes flash. She likes “characters with appetites” she says, elegantly, slowly. “People like Elliot, with blood in their veins.”
When filming, Weisz would perform one side of the scene as Elliot, go back into hair and makeup and costume, “change my centre of gravity”, and then do the same scene from the other side as Beverly. “It was a kind of double job,” says Weisz, but one that thrilled her, because, “I don’t think I’ve ever been given words that good in that particular order.” She grins through a mouthful of porridge. Weisz had long been obsessed with Cronenberg’s cult film, eventually finding a collaborator to adapt it with – writer Alice Birch, who brought a certain dark wit and naughtiness, and depth. “Rachel was across everything,” Birch tells me, “which I think is unusual for the lead actor, but also requires levels of mental gymnastics that I think is exceptional.” It felt, Weisz says, “Completely different to anything I’ve done before.”
Weisz joined the writers’ room in lockdown, becoming quickly intimate with a Zoom grid of female writers over the course of six weeks. “The other writers said afterwards they’d been a bit nervous that they’d have to ‘audition ideas’ to me. But it was nothing like that. I was just… with them.” It was, she smiles, “a group process of daydreaming together”. As well as obsession and identity, the show revolves around the future of women’s healthcare – the birth centre the twins create offers such magics as a virtual forest for labouring women, alongside a lab where ethical boundaries are pushed, nightly. “It’s not sci-fi,” Weisz says, discussing the scientific possibilities the story wades into, it’s closer than that: “It’s near-fi.” They invited identical twins into the writer’s room, who told them stories about telepathy, and scientists, too, “geniuses, I suppose”, experts in embryology, endocrinology, longevity. “There was one very eminent scientist, who believes that death is just a disease that will be curable in the not too distant future. So for him, that’s not even science fiction. That’s just science.” How does that make her feel? “Do I want to live for ever?” She pauses, troubled. “No!”
On the wall behind her is a framed picture of her idol Lou Reed (while at university, she took the train to Berlin to see the wall come down, and later, backstage at a gig she gave a piece of that wall to Reed – a perfect exchange), a painting by an old friend from her warehouse party days, and below it some poems by her son. She shows me around the white room with a measured wariness, careful I think, of not revealing too much. They’re about to get some new wallpaper for the bedroom, “designed by my mother-in-law”, she offers, cautiously, and I ask how she and Craig navigate fame. She frowns, as if the idea is a new one, or at least, one very foreign to her. “Celebrity – it really doesn’t mean anything to me. And it’s no work at all to keep not showing up at events. It’s no work at all, to keep a private life. Life can be demanding, life in a family can be complicated but I don’t even know what ‘celebrity’ means. I don’t think of myself like that.” It’s not exactly that she bristles at the question, more that the concept itself disturbs or offends.
Similarly, when we discuss the fact of her second child, and I ask if she met any public judgment for her age at the time – 48 – she frowns again. “Perhaps it’s just that we were very, very tired. Maybe I didn’t notice what was going on. You go into a bubble when you have a newborn, don’t you?” We pause. “Of course there’s tremendous privilege that comes with it.” With fame. She scrabbles for a second to give an example. “You know, we get really good seats in the theatre.” But generally, “it doesn’t really exist to me. I’m used to it now. Like, if someone recognises my husband, it’s just part of life – they’re normally really nice and go, ‘Best Bond ever!’ or whatever. It’s not in a place where it’s difficult, or oppressive.”
Looking in on her serene Brooklyn study, I ask if she takes her characters home with her. “There is a kind of psychological bending towards your character, which probably affects an actor in ways that you don’t even know. But then I think, you unbend and return fully into the shape you were in.” Is that a skill she’s had to learn? “When you have kids you do have to concentrate more on not bringing it home. And it is a skill to learn, that discipline. I think personally, it’s a skill that’s made me better at my job and better at my life – keeping the two very separate.” She does appear to be thriving, the only friction perhaps being the moments when she’s forced to dip into her life in service to her job; moments, maybe, like this.
Does the idea of two selves, as explored so deftly and bloodily in Dead Ringers, resonate with Weisz? “I think… everybody has lots of selves. A professional self, and the self, say, that goes to the parent-teacher conference. We’re always adapting.” Which is the real you? “They’re all authentic,” she says, definitively, and it feels like a dare.
Dead Ringers is available on Prime Video from 21 April
Styling by Kate Young at the Wall Group; photographer’s assistants Ross Zavoyna and Milos Janjusevic; production by Isaac Feria; hair by Kevin Ryan for Willie Smarts using Unite; makeup by Mary Wiles using Nars at Walter Schupfer Management
