The scenes at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills are enough to make me wonder which is the bigger operation: filming The Bourne Legacy, or putting on the press junket for The Bourne Legacy. Somewhere amid the phalanxes of publicists and warrens of suites is a room attended by clipboard bearers and inside is Rachel Weisz – big-haired, dressed in a slinky fuchsia dress, and blazing with beauty so extreme that there’s almost an absurdity to it. She seems exhausted. The tea-cup-littered table attests to how long she’s been here.
“I’ve spoken to people from all over the world,” she says, “but not many like this, these 'one-on-ones’ – which sounds like some weird sex thing. But it’s part of the… it’s just a part of the job.”
This is Weisz’s first Bourne film, and it’s also the first to feature Jeremy Renner, rather than Matt Damon, in the lead role: in 2009 Damon announced he was stepping away from the saga. Weisz plays Marta Shearling, a scientist who begins the film running a lab and ends up fighting for her life on the back of a motorbike in Manila. That’s an impossibly bravura sequence which deserves to enter the cinematic canon of high-speed chases and Weisz, who spends much of the film in a state of breathless alarm, admits that for those scenes she wasn’t acting: “I was just terrified. It was scary but I suppose it’s sort of a badge of honour that you do your own stunts. So I felt kind of tough.”
Renner only just admitted to her “for the first time yesterday” that the bike sequence was the scariest stunt for him, she says, “because he was responsible for my life. But thank God he didn’t say that to me in Manila. In Manila he was all 'I’m cool, I’m cool, it’s good’ – pretending he wasn’t really scared.”
As well as risking her life hanging off the back of motorbikes, she spent time talking to a real-life virologist as part of her preparation for the role.“What happens in that moment when I sit and talk to someone is that I realise they’re just a human being like me and there’s no reason why I couldn’t pretend to be them. I guess my main thing is that I don’t judge the character, ever, and if I do, I think I’ve probably failed in bringing the character to life. So the analogy would be: I’m their defence lawyer and in my guts I have to believe in their innocence to represent them.”
I’m wondering if someone as smart as Weisz struggles over doing movies as silly as The Mummy, the mega-franchise in which she plays an improbably hapless Egyptologist and with which she made her name. Since her Oscar win in 2005 for The Constant Gardener, her choices don’t seem to conform to any kind of game plan. She has had her share of duds and little-remembered roles.
“The last two movies I had that came out, which probably you didn’t see because not many people did, were a Terence Davies film, which I recommend [this was 2011’s The Deep Blue Sea, in which she played a judge’s wife caught up in an affair] and another film called The Whistleblower which I don’t think even got released in England,” she says. “It was a very low-budget independent movie about a woman who fought sex trafficking in Bosnia. So probably my leanings, my taste, is more indie, but,” she adds smoothly, “I love the Bourne films.”
She enthuses about director Tony Gilroy: “He was a guitarist in a rock-and-roll band for many, many years and I sort of felt like I was in his band – he likes chaos, he likes spontaneity, he likes things to be completely unpredictable and that’s how I like to be.”
There’s a twinkle in her eye as she says this, a naughtiness that hints at the wayward teenager she apparently once was.
“I just didn’t have a sense that teachers or my parents had a right… well, I didn’t have a sense that they were in charge, basically,” she says. “I think it’s quite healthy to rebel.”
Has she mellowed into obedience as she’s got older?
“Oh no, I’m not obedient! No. Definitely not, not for the sake of it anyway. I’m not rebellious just for the sake of that either but I think one has to stand up for what one thinks is right. You can be polite but rebellious. I guess as you grow up you learn to be politely rebellious, rather than ----ing people off.”
Weisz was born in 1970 to Edith, an Austrian psychotherapist, and George, a Hungarian inventor, and she and her younger sister grew up in Hampstead. She studied English at Cambridge – accordingly, almost everything ever written about her seems to include the phrase “brains and beauty”. Does that irritate her?
“My hunch is that a man would never be described in similar terms,” she says. “I think it’s just: 'shock horror – she speaks, she reads and is pretty!’ I think it’s a gender-specific kind of trap. I don’t think people mean it badly, it’s just the way in which people are still thinking, sadly. Actually, it’s just a reflection of the times we’re still in.”
Somehow, we end up talking about her university dissertation, a feminist reading of Carson McCullers, Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor.
“It was about the grotesque body, breaking the smooth boundaries of definition. Particularly in the deep south, it was the place in which women were having to be the most pretty and sweet and,” she delivers this with a little knowing smile, “weren’t allowed to be pretty and clever, you know?”
Weisz has been modelling since she was 14, and in 2005 was made a face of Revlon. When it comes to being an A-list Hollywood actress, being pretty is, I’d imagine, more important than being clever.
“My job… it’s odd in that, you know, you write an article and you have something there to look at, whereas my product is just me. It’s actually me on the stage or the screen. I know that all women struggle with the attention that’s paid to their body; there’s a focus women have on their bodies that I don’t believe men experience in the same way. I know men are objectified too, but I don’t think in quite the same way as women.”
Foremost among those objectified men must surely be her husband, Daniel Craig, most famous for emerging from the sea in a pair of snug swimming trunks on screen as James Bond. There must, I say, have been some family jokes about Bourne versus Bond?
“Not really actually,” she breezes impatiently, “only journalists have brought it up. I guess if I was playing Jason Bourne we’d be talking about it – that would be a direct rivalry but there isn’t any.” She adds, summarily: “I think they’re massively different.”
Did Craig visit her on set, I ask.
“Yeah,” she says evenly. “It was nice.” And, not for the first time, it’s as though a limo’s darkened glass window has just closed over her face. She and Craig married quietly in New York last year, following her 2010 split from director Darren Aronofsky, with whom she has a son, Henry Chance. Unsurprisingly, the tabloid attention was rabid.
“I used to say, 'Oh well, I’m not a celebrity.’ Now to say that would be just silly because clearly I am. Today I’m being interviewed and I’m aware that people are looking at me as if I’m a celebrity, but when I’m running around the streets taking my son to work with no make-up on I mostly don’t think it’s a reality. So I feel like I can opt in and out of it.” She smiles: “But maybe I’m mad!”
In fact, I think the madness of this world she’s in must necessitate a deep level of sanity. For example, you’d surely need to have your head screwed on just to watch yourself on screen. How does she find that?
“If it’s bad acting then it’s unpleasant, but if I’m being authentic and realistic I don’t find it that hard anymore. I did at first. At first it was traumatic.”
That’s a big word, I say.
“Well it is,” she retorts crossly. And then mellows. “Yeah, it is a big word, I’m being actressy and exaggerating, but you know the way people say they can’t stand hearing their voice, it’s a bit like that but magnified because you’re six foot on a screen and each of your teeth is as big as a plate.”
She once used another strong word – “toxic” – to describe Hollywood. Would she stand by that? “I think I may have said that in my early twenties when I first came out here and I was just terrified – it’s easy to demonise something when you’re frightened. I don’t think Hollywood is a bad place. People have an idea of what Hollywood is and I don’t think it’s really true.”
At this point, the publicist in the corner wields her palm in the air.
Seeing my nod, Weisz starts over her shoulder: “What does that mean, there was a signal?”
I explain it means we have five minutes left.
“Oh God!” she exclaims, sounding terribly English. “Have we really been that long? Blimey! OK.”
I ask what she thinks is her greatest strength as an actress. She thinks for a brief moment and then says: “I’m no longer frightened of making a fool out of myself. I think once you’re not frightened of that you become… I think maybe that’s the path to fearlessness.”
With the publicist now semaphoring ardently behind her shoulder, Weisz looks at me and her face ignites into a huge, warm smile. It’s only after I’ve left that I realise perhaps she was just smiling with relief as she saw me switch off my Dictaphone.