Over the past few days, I’ve seen the trailer for the new Rachel McAdams movie about a dozen times. I don’t if the publicity campaign is just targeting me specifically or women like me, but I’m kind of sold on it. The film is called Morning Glory, and in addition to McAdams, it also stars Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton and Patrick Wilson. It looks like it’s part generic romantic comedy and part Working Girl/Broadcast News. I’m calling it: my mom will love this f-cking movie. And so will I, although I probably won’t admit it.
Anyway, Rachel has already starting promoting the film, and she gave an interview to the New York Times that I found interesting – a rarity, because Rachel seems like an actress who tries really hard to give boring interviews. Anyway, Rachel says that when she was flying from Canada into an America, an immigration official began berating her:
RACHEL McADAMS, a 31-year-old Canadian actress who lives here in a house she shares with her younger brother when she’s not off shooting movies, has long held a green card. She can usually cross the border to the United States easily, but a few years ago an American customs officer recognized Ms. McAdams and gave her a hard time.
“She kicked me to the curb,” recalled Ms. McAdams, a slight, 5-foot-4 blonde. “She was tough. I had pink hair at the time, and she said, ‘Don’t dye your hair that color, and don’t make any more stupid movies.’ ”
The actress was too polite to ask which movies the officer might be referring to. “I was just glad she let me through,” she said.
In the eight years that Ms. McAdams has been making movies there have been few glaringly stupid ones. An exception would be her first Hollywood film, “The Hot Chick,” a dopey comedy in which she played a high school cheerleader who switched bodies with Rob Schneider’s small-time crook. Her résumé is notable for the wide variety of characters she has portrayed, ranging from the teenage queen bee everyone loved to hate in “Mean Girls” and the love-struck young woman in “The Notebook,” her first major lead, to the sassy foil of Owen Wilson in the blockbuster comedy “Wedding Crashers” and a returning Iraq war veteran in an independent drama called “The Lucky Ones.” In “State of Play” Ms. McAdams portrayed a high-energy blogger who helps investigate a murder, and in last year’s “Sherlock Holmes” an old flame to Robert Downey Jr.’s pipe-smoking detective.
Next up, “Morning Glory,” a comedy in which she plays a hotshot television producer who must rein in bickering anchors (Diane Keaton and Harrison Ford) while trying to increase ratings on a struggling morning news show. The film opens on Nov. 10.
“Being an actor you get to have so many lifetimes in one,” McAdams said. “I like the comfort of home, the stability and security, but I also want to travel and do new things. Being an actor expedites that.”
Ms. McAdams grew up in St. Thomas , a small town in Ontario; her mother was a nurse, her father a mover. St. Thomas is best known as the place where Jumbo the elephant, the pride and joy of the showman P. T. Barnum, was accidentally crushed to death by a locomotive in 1885. Like virtually all Canadians she learned to skate early, at the age of 4, and dreamed of future Olympic glory on the ice. She discovered her true vocation, however, when she was 12 and attended a performance by a children’s theater group. “I told my mother that I had to be in it, that I would die if I wasn’t,” Ms. McAdams said, laughing at her precocious flair for the dramatic.
“I try to pick movies that I want to make, that offer a challenge, but that people want to see,” she said. “Why do all that work if it’s for naught? If you act and nobody sees it, is it still acting?”
She was attracted to “Morning Glory,” she said, in part because it offered a chance to work with Mr. Ford, 68, who was riding high in “Star Wars” before Ms. McAdams was born. In the movie, her character cajoles the Ford character, a former nightly news anchor, to join her fluffy morning show after finding a loophole in his contract. “Harrison is so funny,” Ms. McAdams said. “He has this amazing dry humor.”
According to Mr. Ford the admiration is mutual. “It was really a pleasure to work with Rachel,” he said. “She’s a very rare combination of having a straightforward approach to the work, and yet there’s always an emotional underpinning to her acting, which is often surprising, both in its correctness for the scene and its availability to her and those working with her.”
[From The New York Times]
Can you imagine being berated by an immigration official? About your career and hair style choices? Goodness. Someone was cranky. Other than that, I think it’s cute that Rachel and Harrison like each other, because I get the feeling that at this point in his career, he doesn’t really give a sh-t. But he cared about Rachel, so that’s nice.
Here’s the trailer for Morning Glory… is Harrison going to get some nominations for this?
photos courtesy of WENN.
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