So not fetch. Rachel McAdams reflected on her career in a new cover story interview with Marie Claire, and revealed why Mean Girls inspired her to press pause on her film career.
The Morning Glory actress, 36, skyrocketed to fame in the early 2000s with the April 2004 release of Mean Girls, followed just months later by The Notebook that June, and Wedding Crashers the following July. McAdams went from being an aspiring star with parts in TV movies to a household name, and the shift made her realize she needed time off to sort out her priorities.
“I had to kind of reassess and go, ‘What did I want this [success] to be, and how did I expect it to look?'” McAdams told Marie Claire for the magazine’s June issue, on newsstands on May 19. After Wedding Crashers hit theaters, the Canadian star went on to appear in Red Eye and The Family Stone before taking a two-year break from the big screen.
While she charmed viewers as The Notebook‘s Allie Hamilton opposite Ryan Gosling, McAdams told Marie Claire that she is a much bigger fan of playing characters like Mean Girls‘ Regina George.
“I prefer to be a villainess,” she said. “There’s something a bit more delicious about their wickedness.”
“At the heart of Regina George was a really angry kid who had no boundaries or guidance,” Adams previously told The New York Times of her queen bee character in April 2014. “[Director] Mark [Waters] told me to listen to Courtney Love really loud, and to watch Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross.”
McAdams is playing another fierce woman in the upcoming season of True Detective, starring alongside Taylor Kitsch, Colin Farrell, and Vince Vaughn, among others.
“I love that she’s not the girlfriend or the wife,” she told Marie Claire of her strong detective character Ani Bezzerides. “She doesn’t really care what everyone thinks; she feels no responsibility for other people’s feelings. She’s not trying to be charming, which isn’t always the case with a leading lady. There’s [usually] sort of a responsibility to be a little bit likeable… Not that you want to be a horrendous character, just a little more human.”
