She’s Looking to Disappear

Some actors live by typecasting, some by versatility. British actress Rachel Weisz belongs in the latter camp, nearly unrecognizable as she slips from role to role. This year she brings her considerable range to three very different films. As an adept comedian, both dark and light, physical and verbal, she takes center stage in the upcoming “The Mummy Returns” and the new art-house film “Beautiful Creatures.” As a dramatic actress, she carries the weight of history in the recent World War II epic “Enemy at the Gates.”

This chameleon quality may be, as Stephen Sommers, director of “The Mummy Returns,” suggests, the result of her willingness to do whatever is necessary to bring a role to life. In the sequel to the blockbuster 1999 hit “The Mummy,” Weisz reprises her role of Evie, the naive librarian-turned-adventurer heroine.

Since last we saw her in “The Mummy,” Evie has gotten married to her hero (Brendan Fraser) and had a son. They are the epitome of domestic bliss-until the evil Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) gets to unwrap his gauze once more and threaten the fate of the world. For “The Mummy Returns,” which opens May 4, Evie even gets to go back in time and engage in a major fight sequence, battling it out with Imhotep’s girlfriend (Patricia Velasquez) in ancient Egypt. Evie may be an academic, but she exists in the cinematic world of “Charlie’s Angels” and “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” where femininity and fighting ability coexist.

“Rachel does everything in this movie,” Sommers says. “She punches, she kicks, she does swordplay, she shoots a rifle. In one scene she winces and that pain is actually real. The main thing is that she was game to do whatever was called upon to do.”

A year after the shoot, which took place in Morocco and London, she recalls with relish the intense physical training necessary for the fight scenes. But the Cambridge-educated Weisz is philosophical about her role. “I thought it was funny-a librarian in an action movie,” she says. “It was like someone stuck in the wrong genre .... She’s someone who read a lot of books but really doesn’t know anything about the world.”

That certainly cannot be said for Weisz (pronounced “vice”), who started working as a teenager (modeling) and seems decidedly worldly-wise. Lightly made up and wearing an old T-shirt beneath a crisply fitted blazer, she has pulled back her raven hair for a look that combines American casual and London chic. At the same time, her graceful composure suggests something Old World.

She has just turned 30, and in her turbulent 20s she tried just about everything, she says. Now she feels much more grounded, but apparent contradictions remain. Throughout the interview, she reveals a penchant for both soft-focus dreaminess and sharp-edged analysis.

The dreaminess may have something to do with the exhaustion of being at the Berlin International Film Festival, where she was interviewed in February; the festival opened with “Enemy at the Gates.” The scheduling has left her “beyond tired,” and she begins this conversation, conducted between a nap and an evening engagement, in a slightly hazy manner. Soon enough, however, she rouses herself, especially as the topics fall on subjects that interest her, such as her recent roles and how she takes on different aspects of the feminine in all its truth and deception.

Why did she choose acting? “It must be a collection of chemical reactions,” she begins, then pauses. Her eyes look vaguely into the middle ground as she takes time to mull over the question before answering. “It’s always such a hard question to answer. Depending on the mood that day, that’s the answer that you get.”

Today’s answer is taking shape inside her head. “I love asking questions,” she ventures. “I love talking to people, particularly strangers. I love getting inside people’s skins-that feeling, that hunger.” Now the thought emerges, fully formed. “I like to disappear. I think questioning someone is a way of disappearing, and acting is certainly a way of disappearing into somebody else.”

In the process, she says, you “learn something about both yourself and others. Finally, the only material you have is yourself, the bricks and mortar.”

Weisz started acting as a student at Cambridge, where she majored in literature (she was especially fond of the works of American writers of the South). With another actress, she founded a small theater company, Cambridge Talking Tongues, which they took to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the Cottlesloe Theatre in London. After graduation, she ventured onto the professional stage, then into television drama and several independent films.

In films she has alternated between supporting roles (in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1996 film, “Stealing Beauty’; one of Ralph Fiennes’ many love interests in last year’s “Sunshine”) and major ones (Helen in Michael Winterbottom’s 1998 “I Want You”). International attention came two years ago when she starred in the campy remake of the Boris Karloff classic “The Mummy,” an unexpectedly huge hit that grossed about $400 million worldwide.

As Tania in “Enemy at the Gates,” she plays a Russian intellectual-turned-soldier defending the Motherland during the siege of Stalingrad; she copes with invading Germans and a love triangle (with Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes). The movie spared no gritty detail of life in the trenches, and she recalls how she dutifully trained for weeks to handle a rifle and how director Jean-Jacques Annaud would slap on another slathering of mud to her face before each day’s shooting began.

As Petula in the twisted comedy “Beautiful Creatures,” she obligingly bleached her hair platinum blond to play a mobster’s trophy girlfriend. One night while she’s being throttled by him, Dorothy (Susan Lynch), a passing stranger, comes to the rescue with a giant water pipe. Later, when he croaks, the hapless duo must jerry-rig a scheme to elude mob and police and get out of Glasgow alive.

“Petula was a huge disappearing act, because I’m so not like her,” Weisz explains. “It was an escape from myself into someone else.” Talking about the role, Weisz’s eyes glaze over, as if she’s watching a projection flickering inside her head. Her body language shifts. She does a tentative flip of her wrist-a Petula move.

“She’s manipulative, I don’t think she’s totally innocent,” she says of the Marilyn Monroe-esque Petula. “I think she hides, she hides beneath her glamour because she’s frightened. She distracts men by the way she looks, and they don’t have to bother to know her, which suits her fine.”

Since Weisz had to bleach her own locks, she had a couple of months of living life as a blond. Actually, it wasn’t so much fun. “Yes, men pay more attention to you,” she acknowledges, “but they don’t really see you, not really, do you know what I mean? They just become overwhelmed by your blondness and can’t see beyond it.” She thought of Petula as someone who liked disappearing too, except her disguise had uncomfortably become her face.

Weisz may possess seriousness of purpose-she admits to being something of a workaholic-but she is aware that the dire situation Tania finds herself in-risking her life for a cause, not knowing if each day might be her last-is out of the realm of her experience. “Still it’s a little disappearing act. You have to disappear into the shoes of someone who’s fighting for her country.”

There was also an additional burden in playing a Russian World War II heroine. “Listen, I had a huge responsibility in this film,” Weisz points out. “It’s a pretty unknown, untold story that more than half a million women volunteered to fight on the front lines [in World War II]. They were driving tanks, they were pilots, they were using antiaircraft machine guns. My character is kind of a collage-there was a real Tania, but in the screenplay she’s a symbol of all the different women that fought.”

As for Evie in “The Mummy Returns,” ’That’s my mum,” Weisz notes with a smile, talking about Evie’s retro aura. “My mum feels like she’s in a black-and-white movie.”

It was Weisz’s 1999 turn in a London stage production of Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer” that caught the attention of both Annaud, director of “Enemy at the Gates,” and Bill Eagles, director of “Beautiful Creatures.”

“She was the fulcrum of this entire piece,” Eagles says by phone from London. “She was stunning and captivating, and it allowed her to let out that classic movie-star quality. She has remarkable presence when given the right material.”

To “Beautiful Creatures” co-star Lynch, Weisz lets audiences “get the spirit of the person without being told-Rachel’s got that ability.”

Weisz likes to be private about her private life, though when asked if she is engaged, as was briefly rumored, she replies quickly, “No, no, far from it.” She points to the ring that sparked the rumor. “It’s on this finger, not the engagement finger. No, I’m very unmarried.” There were also rumors that she was dating “American Beauty” director Sam Mendes, which she brushes aside, saying, “We’ve been friends a long time.”

She does talk freely about her family. Her mother is a psychotherapist, and her father an inventor-turned-industrialist, both emigres from Eastern Europe; she herself was born and raised in London. They were initially doubtful of her future in acting but have since been convinced otherwise.

“They’re very proud now,” she says. “My dad is my harshest critic-which is wonderful because it means that I get the truth from him and it’s hard to know when people are telling the truth.”

Having started her acting career in theater, Weisz finds that it remains a great love. Recently, she turned down several film offers to wait for another choice stage role. Onstage, she’s set to star in a new Neal LaBute (‘Nurse Betty”) play, “The Shape of Things,” which debuts in London next month.

“I’m playing an American, a graduate student who’s studying sculpture,” Weisz says. “It’s a twisted love story, very black comedy about how people use their real life in their art and how couples try to change each other. It’s a tremendous female role. I read it and my hair was standing on end.

“What is amazing about theater is that you get to tell a narrative from beginning to middle to end in one night. As an actor, it’s very frightening and very powerful, and the challenge is very huge. It’s kind of like life, you can’t go back on it.”

Of course she’s not giving up on film. As she begins rehearsals next week on “The Shape of Things,” she’ll also start shooting the comedy-drama “About a Boy,” in which she co-stars with Hugh Grant. She’s also looking forward to a film later this year-John Maybury’s “Marlowe,” based on the life of Elizabethan playwright and Shakespeare contemporary Christopher Marlowe.

Weisz feels a strong attachment to independent filmmaking, but, as her film choices demonstrate, she does like variety. “As a cinema-goer, my favorite film last year was ‘Dancer in the Dark,”’ she says, “but if I went to see it every night, I’d have a nervous breakdown. It’s the same with acting. If I’d played a dark thing all the time-I guess the Stalingrad film’s pretty dark-I’d kill myself. So I try to keep some balance.”

These days, balance is something that she finds more readily attainable. In fact, she’s feeling quite positive about crossing a line-turning 30-that other actresses get unhinged about. “Recently, the last few months, I’ve felt a lot better as a person,” she observes.

After the breakneck speed of working on three films back-to-back, she took time off last year to take a car trip through the U.S., exploring her fascination for Southern gothic, and to redecorate her London apartment.

“I think the older you get the more capable you get at managing life, and it’s just a relief,” she reflects. “In your 20s, everyone just really struggles-the mid-20s are a nightmare! You’re just so scared, but you have to pretend you’re not scared of anything. The 30s and 40s, maybe especially for a woman, you become more and more your own.”