Actress Weisz seeks to revive substantial roles for women

NEW YORK — Rachel Weisz is glowing. “I’ll be showing soon,” she says, with a radiant smile. “(Husband) Daniel (Craig) and I are so happy. We’re going to have a little human.”

But baby news aside, the real reason for the interview is Weisz’s latest movie, “Disobedience,” which she also produced.

The drama is about a young woman who becomes estranged from her father, a highly respected Orthodox rabbi in North London. She is persona non grata in their cloistered community — where gay and lesbian relationships are forbidden — because of a teenage relationship she had with her friend Esti (Rachel McAdams).

Weisz’s character, a photographer named Ronit now living in New York, comes back for her father’s funeral and is bewitched by Esti, who is now married to the rabbi’s protege, Dovid (Alessandro Nivola). The movie focuses both on this taboo triangle and the fraught fatherdaughter relationship in a closed society.

So what did it feel like to What: Where: Contact: Showtimes: Friday Tickets: Drexel: $6 to $10; Gateway: $5 to $10.75

perform her first love scene with a woman?

“Less stubbly,” Weisz says, stroking her cheek. “Softer. I think we both felt very vulnerable, and there was a real sweetness. I don’t know if male actors ask this question, but I know women normally think, ‘Is this sex scene really necessary?’ And in this case, it’s essential. The whole story of repression leads up to this moment.”

Weisz was drawn to doing the film, an adaptation of Naomi Alderman’s novel, because she wanted to explore a relationship between two women where they were not defined by men, where there was no “history of ownership.”

“I just thought, ‘Perfect: a relationship between two women where it has been a friendship since childhood and there’s love and sexuality and yearning and longing and things to do with freedom.’”

Weisz has started her own production company, LC6, to look for more projects to tell stories about women.

“I really enjoy all the thousands of movies I’ve seen about men,” she says. “I mean, there are some great masterpieces. But there’s just a dearth of ones about women. I love women. Women are just really fascinating and different to men.”

We talk about how strange it is that the old Hollywood moguls, who could treat actresses abominably, still produced movies with juicy parts for women in all stages of life, and that the supposedly more enlightened executives that followed reduced women’s roles mostly to wives, girlfriends and hookers.

“I think what happened was, women’s appetites were taken away from them,” Weisz says. “As women got the pill, suddenly it’s like, ‘Let’s not let them be free in the stories.’ Once we had Barbara Stanwyck running around making trouble. Then the ‘70s were worse and in the ‘80s and ‘90s, it got really scary.”

“I can’t bear just really good, idealized characters. ... Contradictory characters or illogical things about women are often taken out, and they’re simplified to either all good or bad, and they’re never allowed to be just layered and complex.”

Weisz has been optioning novels and has six other movies focusing on women in the works.

One is a “Paper Moon”style comedy set in wartime England called “Crooked Heart,” based on a book by Lissa Evans. It is the story of a pair of grifters who pretend to be a mother and son.

She is also planning on producing and starring in a movie about Dr. James Barry, a woman in 19th-century Cape Town, South Africa, who disguised herself as a man to become a doctor. She lived as a man her whole life, rising to be the chief medical officer in the city, which was then a British colony.

Barry got embroiled in a scandal when she was having an affair with the governor and someone saw them partly disrobed and thought they were two men.

“So I’m going to be a bloke,” Weisz says, excitedly.

She seemed to glow at the prospect.

“Disobedience” Drexel Theatre, 2254 E. Main St., Bexley; Gateway Film Center, 1550 N. High St. Drexel: 614-2311050, www.drexel.net; Gateway: 614-247-4433, www.gatewayfilmcenter.org various, starting