Men like me love actresses like Rachel Weisz. Me: mid-thirties, more education than I need, afflicted with a garden-variety Anglophilia. Weisz: mid-thirties, English-born, Cambridge-educated, sexy in that decorous, deeply seemly way only certain brunettes can pull off. She's a tonic for an age of tabloid starlets, a thinking man's knockout. Ralph Fiennes played a thinking man in 2005's The Constant Gardener, with Weisz the fiery wife who inspired him to fight Big Pharma. Hugh Jackman's brainy scientist lost Weisz to a fatal tumor in last year's The Fountain, and he spent the rest of eternity in an interstellar bubble crying about it. Men like that, like me—we warm to the sight of Diaz, Dunst, or Johansson, but Rachel Weisz is our white-hot flame. Which is not to say the feeling is mutual.
"I like firemen," she says. "Irish firemen. What girl doesn't?"
Weisz and I are having tea in the ramshackle back garden of an East Village café in Manhattan. I've just asked her what kind of man she's drawn to. Later in our conversation she'll drop in a reference to Foucault, quote her favorite Smiths lyric, and reveal her love of both the French-born sculptor Louise Bourgeois and the California artist Raymond Pettibon, best known for the "four bars" logo he created for his brother's hardcore band, Black Flag. Weisz owns three of Pettibon's paintings.
She's slighter and even more striking than she looks on-screen, with an intent gaze and a tunneling glamour that belies her jeans-and-a-T-shirt getup. Yet Weisz has built a career not on her beauty but on intelligent, earthy, and sublimely natural performances, most notably her Oscar-winning turn in Gardener. The two blockbuster Mummy movies, in which she played a plucky, sexy librarian, proved she also knows how to show her audience a good time.
Sadly for men like me, Weisz is also engaged to the film auteur Darren Aronofsky—he directed her in The Fountain—with whom she has an 18-month-old son, Henry. Motherhood put her career briefly on pause; now, however, she's about to come back in force. Over Christmas she'll turn up in Fred Claus, director David Dobkin's follow-up to 2005's Wedding Crashers. She plays opposite Vince Vaughan, an experience she describes as "going deep in the culture of Americana."
In February she'll appear as a sexy, free-spirited journalist in the comedy Definitely Maybe; after that, with Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody in the international con-man caper The Brothers Bloom, in which she plays a New Jersey heiress confined to her house for 18 years. Bloom is indie writer-director Rian Johnson's sophomore effort, following last year's noirish hybrid Brick. "This one is playing with genre as well," Weisz says. "I think. Actually, the only person who really knew what was going on was Rian."
