E-mail a friendRachel Weisz
airdate March 3, 2006
London native Rachel Weisz likes quirky roles that are out of character for her personality. She acted in British film and theatre before starring in the blockbusters The Mummy and its sequel, which brought international fame. Weisz began acting at Cambridge University, where she co-founded a theater company and won a student drama award. Her film credits include Enemy at the Gates, Runaway Jury, Constantine and The Constant Gardener, for which she recently earned Golden Globe and SAG nods.
Rachel Weisz
Tavis: I'm pleased to welcome Rachel Weisz to this program. The British-born actress is up for a Golden Globe award Monday night for a stand-out performance in "The Constant Gardener." The film is nominated in two other categories, including Best Drama. If you didn't catch the movie in theaters last year, it's out this week on DVD, thankfully. Here now a scene from "The Constant Gardener."
[A film clip is shown]
Tavis: Rachel, nice to meet you. Nice to have you here.
Rachel Weisz: Lovely to meet you too.
Tavis: I should start by saying congratulations.
Weisz: Thank you.
Tavis: On a couple different things. First, the nomination and then the baby.
Weisz: The baby, yeah.
Tavis: So you just announced the other day that you're pregnant.
Weisz: Yeah, five months now, so it's kind of safe to say out loud.
Tavis: Five months now, yeah. It's your first baby?
Weisz: First time.
Tavis: All right. So how is this feeling for you?
Weisz: Right now, I'm in a good phase. The first three months were a little more tricky. You get morning sickness and a little tired, but I'm feeling quite good now. In the second trimester, I think you start to feel like anything is possible (laughter).
Tavis: So you're going to stop working for a little bit, obviously, to be a mommy for a minute.
Weisz: Yes. Definitely stop working for a while now, yeah.
Tavis: First of all, this movie is really good.
Weisz: Thank you.
Tavis: Where were you when you heard that you had been nominated for the Golden Globe? How did you find out?
Weisz: I was in New York City and I was just getting up. It was early in the morning and my manager called from Los Angeles. I went pretty crazy, actually, with excitement. It was a very over-exciting moment.
Tavis: For those who've not seen the film, tell me how you would describe it.
Weisz: I would say that it's a thriller, it's a love story and it's a political thriller in that it's about the malpractice of international pharmaceutical companies who are testing drugs on Africans, particularly in Kenya, in the story. So it's the sort of the big evil corporations doing harm in developing countries.
Tavis: Is this the first kind of political film that you've done?
Weisz: Yes, I think, yes. Yes, it is, yeah, yeah.
Tavis: I ask that because a lot of people shy away from projects like that. You weren't at all concerned, though, about being part of this political project?
Weisz: Oh, no. I mean, it's wonderful. I like being an entertainer, and it's great just telling stories which are just fun and entertaining. But it's even more interesting if you can find something that has something to say and has some gravitas and is a little bit relevant to today's world that we live in. So, yeah, no, I jumped at the chance.
Tavis: It must be cool, then, after having done that to then look up and see that the film is being critically acclaimed and receiving nominations. So you're making this statement about a real life issue and then it's being rewarded with all this exposure and recognition.
Weisz: Absolutely. No, it's wonderful that people were entertained by it and they were moved by the love story, that they were thought-provoked by the political content and that they remembered it at award time because it came out in the summer, so yes. There were a lot of movies this year, as I'm sure you know, "Syriana" and "Good Night, and Good Luck" and "Munich", that have strong political stories and relevance, so maybe we're having a little bit of a seventies renaissance right now. I hope so.
Tavis: Yeah, I was going to ask you. What's your sense of why that is? Did this just happen or is there something happening to Hollywood?
Weisz: Well, I don't know really what it is, but I'm personally relieved that there are stories being told which - they're not preaching. None of these films are kind of preachy or boring. They just happen to be politically and socially relevant and interesting. I mean, "Syriana" is a very exciting movie. Have you seen "Syriana?"
Tavis: I have, I have.
Weisz: Very exciting, but it's very thought-provoking as well.
Tavis: Tell me about your time in Kenya because you guys filmed on location in Kenya, some of this project.
Weisz: Yes, we did. We were in Kenya for about two months, firstly in Nairobi which is where the slum of Kibera is. It's a shanty town where there are a million people living without running water or sanitation or electricity. That's where we went as a film crew and filmed. It was a very extraordinary experience.
I've never seen poverty on that level before. I've never seen anything like it. That's where my camera character is an activist and she's working with the African people in the slums. For my character, it was kind of like these people are like her family. So it's the place where my character felt most relaxed and it's where I began to feel most relaxed.
The people who live there were very welcoming and warm and hospitable. Then later on, we went to Loyangaloani and we went to the northern parts of Kenya where there are tribes living there that have been living the same way for thousands of years, very primitive tribes. So we lived there, and there are obviously no hotels or there are no cities or anything. They're nomadic tribes, so we lived in tents. So the whole crew lived in a kind of tented city.
Tavis: For how long?
Weisz: For a few weeks.
Tavis: Wow.
Weisz: Yeah, it was very exciting. I never went camping as a child, so it was my first time (laughter).
Tavis: Was that your first time spending time in Africa?
Weisz: No, I'd been before and I had actually been to Kenya before as a tourist. But as a tourist, you see a completely different side of the country to the one that we saw. I'd been to Nairobi, but no White tourist would ever go to the shanty town. In fact, if you look at a map of Nairobi, it's not there. There's just green colored in where there's a million people.
These people are the people who are actually servicing the city of Nairobi. They work in the factories, they work in the hotels. You know, they're running the city. We were filming in real morgues, in real hospitals, in real places where Kenyans were actually living and working and where their lives really go on. As a tourist, you get taken on safari and you stay in a nice hotel, so you don't get to see the real Africa. It was a real privilege to get to see the real country.
Tavis: It's one thing to be a part of a project that is addressing, again, a significant issue. I suspect, though, given your time that you spent in Kenya, that there were lessons or things that you learned from having the opportunity to play this role. There were things that you came away with as a human being, were there not?
Weisz: Definitely, definitely. I mean, I think that everybody feels - most people are essentially good people and I think we all feel that the world has a lot of corruption and injustice. But on the whole, I think we feel that the world is too big, bad and ugly a place for us to really do anything to change anything. We all say, well, it's just a drop in the ocean. What can I do to help? What can I do to change things? The thing I learned from my character was that, even if you just help one person or if you do one thing, it's better than nothing, that these little acts, these little deeds, will amount - you know, lots of little drops in the ocean make an ocean.
I think that the way in which the film company behaved filming was - you know, we were basically a bunch of rich White people going into a developing country. I've been on films where I think the film crews and companies have behaved less than well in these situations. But what the producer, Simon Channing-Williams, did was, as part of the location fee, he built a school in the sum and a bridge in the slum. And we've actually started a charity which we've committed to for the next five years, and we built a secondary school in the north and we're building a road and we're providing fresh water.
Tavis: All of this born of just doing the project there.
Weisz: This is born of doing the project. These are little - I'm sort of going on from doing the little. They're actually little things that we're doing. We're not changing the world, we're not saving the world, but we wanted to say thank you to the communities that we worked in and we want to carry on doing this for the next five years.
You know, we were all confronted by very extreme poverty, by abject poverty. At first, we all thought, well, what could we do? What could we do? It's so terrible. You realize that, if a little group of people get together and start a little organization, you can do small things to help. So in a way, the lesson to me was that it's better to do something small than to do nothing.
Tavis: Tell me right quick about your next project. I read that your fiancé, the father of your baby, your five month old baby - well, not five months old yet, but five months in the process - is directing this next project?
Weisz: Yes, yes. It's called "The Fountain" and we've finished it. It will be finished and edited in about a month. It's called "The Fountain". The title refers to the search for the fountain of youth. It stars with Hugh Jackman and it's a kind of adult fairy tale about love and death and loss. It's very romantic. It's set in three time zones in sixteenth century Spain, present day America, distant future deep space (laughter).
Tavis: In other words, a radical departure from this, "The Constant Gardener?"
Weisz: Very different, yeah. Very different.
Tavis: You know, first of all, I'm delighted to meet you and glad to have you on the program.
Weisz: Thank you.
Tavis: I wanted the best for you before you came on the program, but now hearing the story about how you all connected to this community in Kenya, I really want you to win, so -
Weisz: Oh, thank you (laughter).
Tavis: Good luck to you.
Weisz: Thank you so much.
Tavis: All the best at the Golden Globes on Monday night. Nice to meet you.
Weisz: Thank you, pleasure to meet you.
Tavis: That's our show for tonight. You can catch me on the weekends on PRI, Public Radio International. Check your local listings. I'll see you back here next time, though, on PBS. Until then, good night from Los Angeles. Thanks for watching and, as always, keep the faith.
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