Rachel Weisz’s two recent performances as a queer woman—in Disobedience and in The Favourite—have cemented her new status as a powerful creative force in the industry. Disobedience was the first movie made by her production house, LC6, adapting Naomi Alderman’s novel of the same name about a romance between an Orthodox Jewish woman named Esti and the exile Ronit. Weisz inhabited Ronit with great eroticism and authenticity, to glowing reviews from mainstream critics and the queer community alike. Then, Weisz’s performance as a domineering eighteenth-century seductress in The Favourite struck an unusual note, apparently stirring dormant queer feelings in every straight woman in America. The Twitter jokes were aptly summarized by a post on the satire site Reductress, titled, “Woman Cozily Cupping Mug Secretly Thinking About Getting Absolutely Railed by Rachel Weisz.”

Combined with her ability to light up historical pictures (My Cousin Rachel) and her avant-garde credibility, Weisz’s lesbian turn has elevated her to a new level of Hollywood seniority. Playing queer has raised her intellectual status, as it has also done for Jake Gyllenhaal, Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank, and Sean Penn. Now a starter of cultural conversations in her own right, Weisz’s days as a girlfriend to the movie hero are over. And her evolution says a lot about what kinds of heroine we have been missing.

Some things about Rachel Weisz have changed over the past 35 years, but others have not. She appeared on Good Morning Britain as a young teenager in 1984, having hit headlines for turning down a role opposite Richard Gere in Bruce Beresford’s movie King David. Many years later Weisz would tell the Mirror that she’d “even got to the stage of having a fitting for a wig” for the job before her dad found out what was going on, and put his foot down. “He gave my mother an ultimatum,” she said. “If she didn’t withdraw her approval for the project, he said he would leave her.”

It sounds like a raw deal for a teenager, but at least it generated a few small-screen minutes. In them Weisz has the startled grace of a faun, if a faun had a cherub’s face. The presenter asks, Do you want to be an actress when you grow up? “I’d like to,” she replies. “I’m not totally sure yet.”



Weisz was born in London, in 1970, and raised in Hampstead Garden Suburb, a leafy neighborhood in the north of the city. Her mother is Austrian and her father Hungarian; like many of North London’s residents she was raised Jewish, cultured, and educated. Weisz and I attended the same senior school, North London Collegiate, although she was “asked to leave”—code for expulsion—due to her rebellious behavior. I hated the school and rebelled also, though I stayed: Her ouster has always made her seem mysterious and cool, as if she did what I was too afraid of.