Actor Rachel McAdams has a roster of critical and commercial hits under her belt – from The Notebook to Mean Girls. Still, she couldn’t help feel that her projects didn’t reach her standards most of the time.
Rachel McAdams has always preferred stories with ‘love’ in them
There’s a pattern that McAdams’ career has followed over the years. Many of her successful films had a strong element of romance attached to them, which wasn’t an accident. The Wedding Crashers star once confided that she intentionally gravitated towards movies that were heavy in love. If only because movies without it often felt incomplete.
“I just prefer those films. Every so often, I come across a film where there’s no love story. It doesn’t have to be romantic, but there’s a lack of love, and I don’t get that. I’m like, ‘Something’s missing.’ It’s just personal taste, I guess,” she once told Collider. “It doesn’t always have to be a sweeping romance. I just feel like love and passion are synonymous with each other, whether it’s for a person or a thing, and I just want to see movies that are infused with passion.”
Rachel McAdams once felt her movies never measured up to her expectations
McAdams has been very careful with the movies she’s picked over the years. Her caution might be the reason why she’s been involved in as many commercial hits as she’s done. Her more mainstream projects, which included the likes of Sherlock Holmes, Wedding Crashes, and Mean Girls, all received respectable to above average box-office grosses.
Although McAdams was passionate about her craft, she preferred to be in movies that pulled in a steep audience.
“I try to pick movies that I want to make, that offer a challenge, but that people want to see,” she once said in an interview with The New York Times. “Why do all that work if it’s for naught? If you act and nobody sees it, is it still acting?”
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Still, despite the hits she’d been in, there was a time when McAdams wasn’t completely satisfied with her film resume. The actor believed she had yet to star in a feature that fulfilled her.
“I wish I could just step back and watch a film I’m in and be carried away. But what I see on the screen never encapsulates the experience–that hour and a half never sums up the shooting of it and the relationships you made and the trials and tribulations,” she once told Parade. “So I always am left with a sense of longing. I’m always happy with what’s there and I’m so excited when it all comes together. But it’s never representative of the whole package.”
Rachel McAdams felt guilty about turning down huge film roles
As many hit movies as McAdams has made, she’s also turned down her fair share of blockbusters. She was known for turning down Anne Hathaway’s iconic role in The Devil Wears Prada more than once. She’d also turned her back on films like Iron Man and Casino Royale. In a recent interview, McAdams expressed a little bit of regret regarding her past choices.
“There’s certainly things like ‘I wish I’d done that.’” she told Bustle. “I step back and go, ‘That was the right person for that.’”
It took some self-reflection for the actor to realize why she said no to all of those projects.
“I felt guilty for not capitalizing on the opportunity that I was being given, because I knew I was in such a lucky spot. But I also knew it wasn’t quite jiving with my personality and what I needed to stay sane,” she said. “There were definitely some anxious moments of wondering if I was just throwing it all away, and why was I doing that? It’s taken years to understand what I intuitively was doing.”
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