Rachel McAdams Is The Best Actor Ever
Rachel McAdams had been anointed Hollywood's latest "It Girl" when she was tapped to grace the cover of Vanity Fair's 2006 Oscar issue alongside Keira Knightley and Scarlett Johansson. She was coming off a string of critical and commercial successes in "Mean Girls," "The Notebook," "Red Eye" and "The Family Stone," and appeared to be on the cusp of superstardom. But when McAdams learned, upon arriving at the Tom Ford photoshoot, that she was expected to pose nude, she walked, promptly fired her publicist (who'd failed to inform her of the shoot's parameters), and pressed the pause button on her film career.
Prior to the #MeToo revolution, firing up double rockets at the exploitative Hollywood movie star machine was considered career suicide. This was how women got smeared with the "difficult" label. McAdams, however, persevered and has established herself as one of the most brilliantly unpredictable actors of her generation. She's played the franchise blockbuster game but has largely sought out roles that challenge her strengths. McAdams does daffy with dignity better than anyone since Carole Lombard, and burrows deep into the harrowing inner lives of women navigating the choppy waters of a hostile, male-dominated society.
There may not be an actor alive today more capable of genuine surprise than McAdams. She isn't a chameleon like Meryl Streep or Gary Oldman. She doesn't disappear. She is a star in this sense. She blends. Whether playing defiant or silly, everything we love about McAdams as a performer is present. And what we love is that we really don't know her. I sat with her at two roundtables early in her career (for "The Notebook" and "Wedding Crashers"), and she was thrillingly coy. McAdams is an insouciant enigma.
The breakout
The teen comedy resurgence of the late 1990s — nudged into existence by "Clueless," but kicked into overdrive by "She's All That" — resulted in a slew of formulaic films that viewed high school through the dated lens of a 1980s John Hughes movie. It was like "Heathers" never happened. Thankfully, in 2004, armed with a stiletto-sharp screenplay from Tina Fey, director Mark Waters (the brother of "Heathers" writer Daniel Waters) slashed open an artery with "Mean Girls." The high stakes of being a teenager in the more sophisticatedly cruel internet era made "The Breakfast Club" look like an afterschool special.
"Mean Girls" is a star vehicle for Lindsay Lohan, and she is spectacular in it, but the film's curdled heart belongs to McAdams' Regina George. She is the Queen Bee of a sting-happy hive of glam girls. She oversees a Burn Book, the clipped-together contents of which can destroy every single one of her classmates' lives. Regina is a vindictive terror unleashed on society thanks in part to the hilariously permissive parenting of her mother, June (Amy Poehler). She rules North Shore High School with an iron fist. She fears no one.
But McAdams didn't explode out of nowhere. She handled the unenviable task of playing Rob Schneider in 2002's abysmal "The Hot Girl" with uncommon grace, but her portrayal of Regina overpowers a never-better Lohan, primarily because Fey's savage sensibility favors this hateful creature. McAdams' Regina is Stanwyck-like in her casual viciousness, and there's no redemption for her. She starts playing lacrosse because it's an acceptable outlet for her violent disposition, but a monster like Regina seeks more worlds to conquer. It's a tour de force of malevolence, one that didn't sync up even a little bit with McAdams' next triumph.
The career
I was writing for Ain't It Cool News in 2004, and I knew my readership was not at all interested in Nick Cassavetes' adaptation of Nicholas Sparks' weepie "The Notebook," but New Line Cinema's publicists had read my rave for "Mean Girls," and they played up McAdams' performance. I had to go.
McAdams' Allie is a handful. She's a free spirit confined by her wealthy parents, but she is truly, madly in love with Ryan Gosling's Noah. This is basically Harlequin Romance stuff, but McAdams and Gosling invest the yarn with feverish yearning. They're so good that we buy without question the time shift to the legendary likes of Gena Rowlands and James Garner as their older selves.
McAdams revealed at "The Notebook" press day that she was in the running for the role of Sue Storm in Tim Story's "Fantastic Four." She would've been terrific in the part, but this was the moment when she decided to fight against the system. When McAdams ended her brief hiatus, she bounced back in a trio of ensemble films. She's great in "Married Life," "The Lucky Ones," and the strangely forgotten "State of Play," but her natural effervescence didn't bubble anew until Roger Michell's gossamer media comedy "Morning Glory." Woody Allen did her a tad dirty by writing her into a b****y corner opposite Owen Wilson in "Midnight in Paris," but she showed off her versatility via the scorpion-like Christine in Brian De Palma's "Passion" and the romantic lead of Richard Curtis' lovely "About Time."
McAdams earned her first Oscar nomination for her supporting performance in Tom McCarthy's scathing "Spotlight," and of course, it was for possibly the most modulated work of her career. She listens, which is the most vital skill an actor can possess. But has anyone listened with greater dynamism? It's not showy, but her colleagues got it. McAdams could've chased another prestige part after this, but she decided to be transcendent.
The defining role
John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein's "Game Night" is an ingeniously constructed comedy that inexplicably got brushed off as a formulaic lark. Working from an ingenious screenplay credited to Mark Perez, the film's happy idea is that the participants in this city-sprawling game have no idea that their lives are in constant danger.
Jason Bateman and McAdams occupy the film's central arc as a married couple that believes every near-death situation is a pre-planned goof. Bateman is wonderful as the aloof husband, but McAdams hurls herself into the part of Annie, a flighty delight who at one point finds herself using a loaded gun as an ersatz microphone while belting out Third Eye Blind's "Semi-Charmed Life." The script asks her to be unflappable, and she delivers with aplomb at every turn. When she's forced to extract a bullet from Bateman's arm, only to discover it exited, her excited reaction is bliss. She can't shake that this is a game, even though it's so clearly not. This is gloriously punctuated when she watches her potential executioner get sucked into a jet engine. "Oh no, he died," is a line reading for the ages.
Rachel McAdams is the semi-reincarnation of Carole Lombard. She revels in silliness, but watch her in the second season of "True Detective," and you've got a tragic slow-burn alcoholic. She can do anything. Give McAdams space, and let her cook. The best is yet to come.
Her next feature, the highly-anticipated adaptation of Judy Blume's "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret" hits theaters on April 28, 2023.