Martini? No make mine a Tequila Slammer!
RACHEL WEISZ wouldn’t mind playing a spy who is invincible, yet lonely, despite a ‘large sexual appetite’. The Oscar-winning actress, who knows all about screen spies — she’s married to Bond star Daniel Craig, after all — sips water and asks why this character shouldn’t be sexually vociferous ‘just because she’s a woman’? Would she have a cocktail of choice, I wonder? ‘I actually really like vodka Martinis,’ says Rachel (pictured), with a twinkle.
But in the case of her hypothetical spy, the tipple should really be something inelegant, because obviously we’re not talking about a female Bond. ‘A Tequila Slammer!’ she says, eyes lighting up. Rachel says she liked Angelina Jolie when she played a CIA operative in Salt — a part originally written for a man. I comment that although she has powerful roles in two films just screened at the BFI London Film Festival — Yorgos Lanthimos’s The Lobster and Paolo Sorrentino’s Youth (she plays Michael Caine’s daughter: a woman with ‘ daddy issues’), and despite Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara’s performances in Carol, and Carey Mulligan’s in Suffragette, there is still a lack of strong roles for women.
She takes immediate issue with the word strong. ‘To me strong means you lift dumbbells,’ she says. ‘I don’t think you’d say Tom Hardy, or George Clooney’s found a strong role. Well, you wouldn’t! It’s slightly weird, isn’t it?
‘If I play a body-builder one day — which I might!’ she says laughing, ‘then maybe that might be strong.’ I’m not disagreeing. She’s right — and I quite enjoyed being slapped down by one of our best screen actresses, within the elegant confines of the Soho Hotel.
Rachel takes another sip of water and says there’s too much chatter about roles for women. ‘I think we all have to get on with it.’
The actress is the personification of that view. With The Lobster out today, Youth released January 29, and three other pictures completed (plus several others in pre-production), she’s certainly getting on with things.
In The Lobster, guests — including recently single David, played by Colin Farrell — check into a hotel run by Olivia Colman (not strong, but fantastic). The movie’s mythology dictates that any guest still single 45 days later checks out . . . as an animal.
‘It’s very brave, very dangerous and edgy,’ Rachel says.
Without giving too much away, her character turns up midway through the film, and goes off with Farrell. She says when she arrived at the location, halfway through shooting, Farrell looked at her and said: ‘I just can’t explain to you what this was like but . . . good luck.’
He told her it was the ‘wildest, strangest, funniest’ acting job he could recall.
And though she agrees it was ‘unchartered territory’, she says she would work with Lanthimos again, in a heartbeat.
PARTS of the movie annoyed me, I confess. But I have sat through it twice — and argued with people about what it means. One insisted it’s all connected in some odd way to Greek mythology. I have no clue about that, but I’ll go along with Robert Altman’s dictum that ‘great art divides’.
Rachel did all of her scenes with Farrell who, she says, looked less hunky than usual, and more chunky. ‘He had to eat a lot of ice cream for the role. To me he’s always going to be chunky Dave (after his character). He’s got this incredible sweetness in the film, because you’re not distracted by the Adonis. You can see his soul.’
I know she’s a Presley fan and I say that chunky Colin reminded me of Elvis in his roly-poly years. ‘Yes, the Las Vegas era. Colin’s like chunky Elvis,’ she says, giggling.
She’ll be in London for a while working on future projects and, of course, she’ll attend the Spectre premiere with Daniel on October 26.
I reckon she’ll probably have a Tequila Slammer afterwards.