Rachel Weisz: ‘I never thought I would get married. It was not an ambition of mine’
Emily Ross I love Rachel Weisz. She’s one of my “forevers.” I always imagine that she and Daniel Craig are just constantly in bed together, because… let me just have that image of them. But of course the reality is that Rachel is a pretty well-rounded person. She’s in a book club, she cooks Sunday dinners, she goes to see plays and she lives a pretty quiet existence in New York as Mrs. Daniel Craig. Rachel was profiled in the current issue of ES Magazine (the Evening Standard’s weekly), and here are some highlights from her interview:
While she’s a New Yorker, her heart is still in Britain. She swiftly extols the virtues of the NHS (‘Of course it’s flawed and overstretched and there are immense problems, but it does actually work’), Radio 4 (’I can’t cook without it on, I just freeze up’) and Stormzy (‘I think he’s brilliant. My godson introduced me to him a couple of years ago’).
Whether she’d move back to the UK after her son went away to school. ‘Yeah, I’d probably go back to the UK. I’m sort of half here and half there anyway. And my last four films have all been made there.’
Whether marriage has changed her: ‘I don’t know how to answer that. I mean, I wear a ring all the time. I wear my ring with pride. I’m taken.’
Whether marriage is institutional. ‘You don’t join the institution like it’s the Rotary Club. You make it your own. It’s very personal, it’s very private. I don’t think mine’s particularly exceptional apart from that we’re both in the public eye. But I never thought I would get married. It was not an ambition of mine. It was the opposite. I couldn’t relate to romantic comedies — marriage seems to be the whole point of them. Then it just happened, happily, at a more mature moment.’
She started modeling as a teenager: ‘I wanted to be very independent, I was trying to earn my own money and, at the time, it seemed quite glamorous, like it would give me access to power or something. But you have to be very disciplined — successful models work very, very hard. I was not a good model.’Her life in New York. She is in a book club with other mothers at Henry’s school. ‘And I see a lot of plays, a lot of films, a lot of friends. I cook Sunday lunches, have people over with their kids. People reading this in England will go: “Yeah and?”, so can you please explain the difference?’ she requests. ‘It’s much more formal here. People arrange to meet in a restaurant. There’s less of that thing of just putting a chicken in the oven and the kids running around, and it being a bit more messy and informal.’
She knew about Harvey Weinstein long ago: ‘My friend Sophie Dix [the British actress who is one of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers] has been talking about this since the 1990s. [Weinstein allegedly assaulted her in a hotel room at The Savoy when she was 22]. She would tell anyone who would listen her story, for the last 20 years. And no one seemed to care,’ Weisz says.Why Weinstein was brought down: ‘I think his power was on the wane,’ she shrugs. ‘Same with Bill O’Reilly, same with Charlie Rose [two prominent television news anchors accused of sexual misconduct]. It’s about economics — they weren’t turning over the big bucks any more. That’s not an optimistic thing to say, but this is all about power and money.’ She isn’t without optimism entirely though. ‘Let’s hope there’s some real structural change to come out of this. That women who don’t have huge platforms on Twitter, who are nurses or office workers, feel that they can talk to their bosses if this is happening to them.’
“But I never thought I would get married. It was not an ambition of mine.” I guess that’s why she and Darren Aronofsky were together for all of those years without ever marrying. I thought that was always more on him, that he was commitment-phobic. But maybe she was too. And then Daniel Craig reentered her life and suddenly she was ready for marriage? Sure. I would be too, girl. Everybody’s ambivalent about marriage when they’re waking up to Darren Aronofsky. Then one day you wake up next to Daniel Craig and you’re like “MARRY ME.”
Sadly, I think she’s right about why so many high-profile men were brought down – they were downed because they had already lost power and influence.
Photos courtesy of ES Magazine, Getty.
