Rachel McAdams on her role as Clare in The Time Traveller's Wife: 'They're constantly having to reevaluate their relationship and choose each other.'Courtesy of New Line Cinema
Rachel McAdams is pushing peppermint tea.
The Waldorf-Astoria waiter who just ostentatiously deposited a silver tray bearing hot water in front of director Robert Schwentke neglected to leave a tea bag before sweeping out of the otherwise empty room where the German-born director and his Canadian leading lady are giving press interviews for The Time Traveler'sWife. (Her Australian co-star, Eric Bana, has already taken his leave.)
"Do you want to use my peppermint?" McAdams inquires, her slender fingers plucking the tea bag off her plate and offering it to Schwentke, who demurs.
But McAdams is not so easily deterred. "You can make, like, 18 cups out of this. Sure you don't want this?" she asks. After all, this is a woman with a website called GreenIsSexy.org. She knows from recycling.
Schwentke is content with plain hot water, though, so the interview continues.
The vision of this spectacularly elegant woman in a designer gown trying to press a peppermint tea bag into extended service encapsulates the image of down-to-earth glamazon that McAdams, 30, manages to portray both onscreen and off. In her single-shouldered mini-dress, and with her light brown hair swept into a gleaming French twist, McAdams resembles no one more than a young Audrey Hepburn. Then, as she relaxes into her chair with a slouch, she looks more like the girl next door - albeit one with amazing skin and killer five-inch heels.
But it is her ability to portray a woman with a singular passion - true love - so believably that won the actor her latest role: that of a woman who marries a time traveller with a genetic quirk that causes him to disappear at inconvenient moments, in the film based on Audrey Niffenegger's bestselling novel. It's hardly a conventional love story, and Schwentke ( Flightplan ) says McAdams's presence is the key to persuading audiences to suspend disbelief.
"There's no moment where I look at Rachel in the movie and say, 'Well, I don't think she would have signed on for that, I don't think she would have been swept away, I don't think she would have been so in love with this guy,'" Schwentke says. "There's like a chemical reaction between her and the camera that's very, very special."
Sitting next to Schwentke, who's nursing his hot water, McAdams absent-mindedly traces small circles with her finger on her bare leg. "Well, thank you, I appreciate that," she says politely.
Her breakthrough role came in 2004's The Notebook , a tear-jerker romance based on Nicholas Sparks's bestselling novel of star-crossed lovers. Audiences fell for the luminous McAdams, and she fell for co-star Ryan Gosling, with whom she had a tabloid-thrilling, on-and-off relationship for three years.
She recently went public with a new beau, actor Josh Lucas; they canoodled at an Obama inauguration party. More recently, they've been spotted together around Toronto and New York. She stays diplomatically silent about her own romance, but doesn't hesitate to gush about the inspiration for her role as one half of a committed, passionate couple: the relationship between her father, a truck driver, and her mother, a nurse.
"My parents are still very much in love, and as a kid growing up, I think I took it for granted," she says, staring off into the middle distance as she muses about her upbringing in London, Ont. "But now I'm absolutely in awe of that kind of commitment and perseverance - the fluctuations, and riding those out, the trust that comes with that."
The Time Traveler's Wife concerns itself less with the fireworks of falling in love than with the work of sustaining love through the vicissitudes of life - and McAdams acknowledges the latter is infinitely more challenging. "They're constantly having to reevaluate their relationship and choose each other. As much as it does seem fated, they could walk away," she says.
And, strange as it may sound, McAdams can also relate to the plight of a time-traveller cursed to be constantly torn from the present and thrown into strange situations. (For fans of Bana's physique in particular, and male onscreen nudity in general, it's worth noting that the movie stays true to the book's contention that, while Bana's character can travel through time, his clothes cannot.) "As actors, we understand that push-pull in life, where you're separated from your family and your friends for long periods of time, and you're sort of thrust into a world you don't know," McAdams says.
Making The Time Traveler's Wife provoked no such geographic dissonance, as it was filmed mostly in and around Toronto, where McAdams makes her primary home. Of course, that convenience presented its own set of challenges. After a long day of immersing herself in the role of Clare, McAdams says, she'd have to come back down to earth and the real-life duties of grocery shopping and toilet cleaning.
Still, the shoot did give her the opportunity to discover new wonders in her own back yard, including a gorgeous meadow outside Toronto that hosts some of the movie's pivotal scenes.
"You think you know a place so well, but really sometimes that's the most unexplored place to you because you take it for granted," she explains. "So I got to experience where I come from through this film in a totally new way, which was unexpected and really kind of exciting for me."
If McAdams's career shows any pattern, it might have something to do with experiencing the unexplored. The actress is notoriously picky about her projects, and has resisted typecasting, going from the smash hit Wedding Crashers to the psychological thriller Red Eye to a supporting role as a sardonic sister in the ensemble comedy The Family Stone , all released in 2005.
After a fallow year in 2006, she co-starred in the 1940s-set Married Life (2007), the war drama The Lucky Ones (2008) and this year's political drama State of Play .
She was reportedly director Jon Favreau's first choice to play secretary/love interest Pepper Potts in Iron Man , but turned it down. (The role went to Gwyneth Paltrow.) This winter, she'll appear with Iron Man 's Robert Downey Jr. in the much-anticipated Sherlock Holmes movie, her first foray into a full-blown Hollywood action blockbuster, playing a seductive adversary who matches wits with Holmes - a role that seems quite a bit meatier than that of your standard lovelorn secretary.
When it comes to choosing roles, McAdams says, she defers to fate. "In a weird way, I think they choose you," she says, frowning thoughtfully. "I try to go with that pull. It's a good sign when you can't stop thinking about it. … I try to just embrace it when it comes; it's almost out of my control."
So if love is a constant choice, but movie roles arrive on the wings of destiny, what does the future have in store for McAdams? She professes to have no idea - and likes to keep it that way. While she says she'd be tempted to time-travel to the past to watch her parents fall in love, getting a preview of her own life holds no allure.
"No, I'm more interested in the past than going into the future. I suppose I should be more fascinated with the present than anything else. I mean, that's what the Buddhists and everyone tell us: There's the key to happiness," she says, punctuating her point with a burst of laughter.
"But no, I don't think I would go forward. I like the element of surprise."