Twisted Sisters

Rachel Weisz tells Tom Hodgkinson about the blood, guts and sisterhood it took to bring her new series, Dead Ringers, to the screen

Rachel Weisz is one of those rare people who was probably born a star. I remember, as a London teenager in the eighties, people talking about her, as if she was already famous. At Cambridge, where she read English, she started a theatre company called Talking Tongues, and was soon on the telly and in the West End.

Older readers may remember her explaining the attractions of the drug ecstasy, to a bemused Inspector Morse in the early nineties. I saw her in 1994 in Noel Coward’s A Design for Living in the West End, for which she won an award. She then hit the big time in the USA. It started with The Mummy. She later won an Oscar for The Constant Gardener and has starred in About A Boy, Constantine and loads more.

Rachel regularly appears in those “100 hottest actresses” lists. One female friend says “she manages to be pretty and beautiful at the same time”.

And we can add charm to the beauty and brains. Rachel came along to the 2022 Idler Festival. She said hi to me there – I hadn’t seen her for 30 years – and called me the following week to say how much she’d enjoyed it. It was then that she told me she was working on a remake of Dead Ringers, the David Cronenberg film starring Jeremy Irons as two creepy gynaecologist twins. She plays the ambitious doctors Beverly and Elliot Mantle. The remake was all her idea and she is credited as executive producer. I asked if she’d consider doing an interview for us and she said, “I’d love that.”

And so nine months later, I took a trip to New York and we met for lunch in a lovely cafe in Brooklyn where she had a bowl of chicken soup and I had hummus and bread. No booze: this is New York. I’d watched five out of the six episodes of Dead Ringers. It’s very funny, very bloody, with lots of screaming, is completely gripping, dark, with babies everywhere, and features Jennifer Ehle as a truly horrible Sackler type investor, who the twins hope will help them realise their dream of building their own “birthing centre”. And though weird, the show manages to remain relatable. Lots of us can identify with the embarrassment of the parental visit, for example, when the twins’ slightly gauche English mum and dad visit New York. Women are centre-stage: most of the men in the show remain in the background and are a bit weedy.

I’d also recently watched The Favourite, where Rachel plays scheming, blood-spattered Sarah Churchill, power-mongering courtier to Olivia Colman’s Queen Anne. And Agora, where she plays Hypatia of Alexandria, the fourth century philosopher and mathematician, who was known for her intellectual brilliance but also for her beauty. That seemed to me to be very Idlerish with its ancient settings and interest in education.

Tom Hodgkinson I loved Agora, where you play Hypatia the mathematician…

Rachel Weisz “A big action movie about a female philosopher in the fourth century” – never would one think such a sentence could be uttered, right? The director Alejandro Amenábar had the idea that Hypatia might have come up with the heliocentric model, which only Aristarchus, apparently, had posited before that, in fragments. Alejandro had done The Others with Nicole Kidman, which was a riff on Henry James’s Turn of the Screw. For him, [Agora] was looking at the birth of fundamentalism, the concept of fundamentalism… The pagans, Jews and Christians were not quite living in perfect harmony, but they were tolerant of each other. Then the Christians got violent. The agora is the marketplace where people meet. Well, the Idler is an agora, isn’t it – it’s a marketplace for exchanging ideas. That’s really its jam, I would say, from an outside perspective! No?

TH Yes, exactly! Agora also prefigures Dead Ringers in a funny way. During a lecture Hypatia brings out a bloody rag and shows her menstrual blood to her male students, who all lust after her. That’s quite gynaecological.

RW Oh my goodness I hadn’t thought of that. That’s right, she used it as an example of how she’s not perfect, to put off the boys.

TH Now, I watched The Favourite recently and there’s a lot of blood in that, too. Again, your character Sarah Churchill has something of the Mantle sisters. There’s something in the film, the blood and sexual transgression, dark comedy and general weirdness that’s a bit like Dead Ringers.

RW Well these roles come from really good writing. In the case of Dead Ringers it’s Alice Birch, the main writer, whose brilliant writing makes that level of complexity. She brings out the contradictory qualities in the twins’ characters. They’re a bit aberrant and a bit twisted, a bit dysfunctional…

TH In The Favourite you were chosen to play Sarah Churchill…

RW Yes, I was an actress for hire. I lucked out and got that incredible role with Olivia Colman. That was an amazing gig.

TH But with Dead Ringers you’re the prime mover behind the idea, the producer. How long has it taken you to make it into a reality? To me, it seems magical that a film or TV series ever gets made, as there must be so many hurdles.

RW It’s been about six years in the making, from the original idea. I was just a big fan of the original, I never forgot it, it haunted me. And one day I thought, what if it were gender-swapped, as the expression goes? Yeah, there are women gynaecologists out there. So in 2017 I took the idea to a producer called Sue Naegle who worked at Annapurna, a production company. So the first step really is: you have to tell someone else, who might look back at you and say, “I think that’s a good idea.” Sometimes you tell people an idea and they look blankly at you. Sometimes they go, “I believe in that idea.”

This is an excerpt from a longer interview in the May/June edition of the Idler.