Before Rachel Weisz sits down, she needs to go to the Ladies. "Got to get some tissues," she says, her accent a north London glottal with just a hint of American, "my first cold in ages", and disappears in a whirl of mushroom cashmere and clacking platforms. Minutes later she returns, daintily dabbing at her nose. "Realised I needed a pee while I was there. Just thought you'd like to know."
It is teatime, it is cold and we are sitting at a table in the back of The York & Albany in Camden Town, a mere stroll from the house Weisz owns in Primrose Hill, where she is staying while she promotes her latest film, The Bourne Legacy, opposite Jeremy Renner and Ed Norton.
Of all our Hollywood exports, Weisz is arguably one of the finest. She's out-of-the-park beautiful — a kind of Mittel Jessica Rabbit, but smart, smart, smart, too. What intelligence, above anything else, she brought to the role of Tessa Quayle, in The Constant Gardener, for which she won an Oscar in 2006. And wasn't her Blanche DuBois in the Donmar production of Streetcar — for which she won an Olivier — pretty peerless? No wonder America has embraced her with such welcoming arms. No wonder she has embraced it. For, technically, "home" now is a spacious apartment above a tattoo parlour in Manhattan's East Village. "Gentrified," she says, "but still edgy because of all the students."
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Yes, of course she misses London —"I adore English people!" — but luckily she can get Radio 4 on digital and there are supermarkets "which sell PG 'lips and Marmite". Really? Can Mr and Mrs James Bond do their shopping unhindered in downtown Manhattan? Doesn't she now feel a little exposed? "Oh, for goodness' sakes, no, no no," she says, horrified that I would think such a thing. "I don't have any hassles at all!" And what about her husband, does he get to come with her? "He does, he does," she insists, "he just, er... wears a hat!"
This is not the first time Weisz and I have met. That was in the mid-Nineties, when she was going out with Sam Mendes. We were in a box at the Royal Albert Hall, and I remember the pair of them rocking up, she looking the ultimate indie ingenue in a big white vintage fur coat, with the sort of aura you can feel on the back of your head. Today Weisz, 42, is still as warm and open and self-deprecatory (what a filthy laugh for such a dainty girl!), yet as maddeningly inscrutable as ever, neither flinching not re-crossing one shapely leg over the other if a topic she does not want to discuss arises. Still as arresting-looking, too, with those* Planet of the Apes* brows, as she once called them, those bruised cheekbones and that ivory-white skin ("I used to sit out in Hampstead Garden Suburb covered in Bergasol in my teens; then, when I hit my twenties, no more"). She's got proper normal laugh lines, too. No Botox then, just a really, really good facialist in Los Angeles "who does cranio-sacral therapy and massages inside your mouth._ Slightly new-agey, it gets you a little high."
Being in her forties suits her. She's still minxy, obviously, with those dramatic features and raven hair, but she seems wiser, more maternal, perhaps. As her best friend and fellow Cambridge graduate Rose Garnett observes: "She is going to be a fucking fabulous older woman." "Inshallah, God willing," says Weisz graciously, "but then I loved turning 40, and the idea of turning 50 is fantastic."
The look today is tight, tight Rag & Bone jeans (she lives in Rag & Bone unless she's going posh — then it's Stella, "whose trousers kind of lift one's bum"). The coat is Rick Owens, designer of her favourite-ever leather jacket: "A major investment, fucking expensive, but you know, I've had it for years and years and if you do cost for wear... Narciso Rodriguez, who sleeps in his, gave me some good advice. I kept saving it for best and he said, just wear it like a cardigan..." Her body is tiny and shapely, but not alienatingly so. She has a Pilates teacher, whom she started seeing after giving birth to her son, but it's "totally different" to what her husband does, and all that talk of developing "baby guns" for The Bourne Legacy is tosh. "If I lifted weights I'd get huge. I'm naturally very muscly, so I'm kind of into general and moderate."
Marriage clearly suits her, but here we are going to have to tread carefully: like the simple gold band she wears on her lily-white wedding finger, she's not exactly shouting from the rooftops about it. One wants to ask all sorts of silly questions about whether Daniel Craig wears those swimming trunks around the house, but Weisz is far too deft, far too used to the interviewing process to let anything juicy slip.
This much we know She called of her five-year engagement to the director Darren "Black Swan" Aronofsky, father of her six-year-old son, Henry, in the summer of 2010. Not long afterwards it was announced that Craig had broken his long-standing engagement to Satsuki Mitchell. Last June, she and Craig were married, super-discreetly, in the grounds of their upstate New York country house. There were only four witnesses, two of whom were Henry and Ella, Craig's 20-year-old daughter by his first wife, the actress Fiona Loudon. "I was made a very beautiful [dress] and he was very sweet," offers Weisz with that inscrutable smile. "But I don't have to tell anyone who by..."
Weisz and Craig first met in 1994 when they appeared together in a play at the National Theatre Studio. Entitled Les Grandes Horizontales, it was put on by Talking Tongues, the experimental theatre company Weisz founded at Cambridge with fellow students Garnett and David Farr. Weisz played the courtesan Cora Pearl, Craig played the commandant — "I didn't cast him, the others did!" — who falls madly, hopelessly in love with her (there were a few tasteful nude scenes together). "We did two performances," Weisz recalls. "I think Peter Brook came to one of them. Tragically no one videoed it, I wish they had." Rumour has it Craig held a torch for her ever since. Whatever the case, the next time the couple hooked up professionally was on the set of Jim Sheridan's thriller Dream House, and that was that. Manhattan-based author Carole Radziwill, who has known Weisz for years, remembers Weisz telling her about Craig over coffee in LA. "I was talking about my rather dull-at-the-time love life when Daniel called her. They spoke for only a few minutes, and when she hung up she looked at me and giggled and blushed. At that very moment I felt they would get married. I 'mew it was big love, real big love — and that it came with a face and body like Daniel's... Hell, that ain't so bad either."
As for Weisz, whenever I veer anywhere near the subject, all I get is a chocolatey smile. "Look," she says eventually, "there are other people involved, it's not just me. If I was a solo show. If I didn't have a child who could almost read..."
Certainly, on the looks front, Weisz and Craig make the perfect pair, she so raven, he so gnarly. In interviews past, Weisz has admitted to an "exhibitionist" streak, which she now vehemently denies. But doing the red carpet as Mr and Mrs James Bond must be fun? "Well, actually, I don't see it like that," she gently corrects. "I don't think any actress would say doing the red carpet is not terrifying. The way to get through it is to pretend. It's a fantasy, like walking into a fantasy world. These people, they transform you, and that is fun."
"Rachel has a fantastical imagination which serves her well," agrees director Sean Mathias, who worked with Weisz early in her career. "Yet at the same time she is very analytical and has a habit of scrutinising things in her mind before committing. She is very true to herself, so it was quite shocking to see her play that whole Hollywood game. She's such an iconoclast, I thought she'd skirt all that."
"What you see on the red carpet is not a character that has anything to say," explains Weisz. "I used to be very shy, and in a way that was what was so great about the idea of acting. You can hide the real you behind that character."
Weisz's new film, The Bourne Legacy, offers plenty of scope for her imaginative bent, though little can be revealed here: "The paranoia around the film is as paranoid as the film itself — I think they feed off each other," Weisz observes diplomatically. Let's just say Jeremy Renner takes on the mantle of Matt Damon as another Treadstone alumni, Aaron Cross, and Weisz plays Marta, "a nice, normal, regular person" who ends up on the run with Cross through the slums of Manila. "We had to literally run through the homes of these warm, kind people with all their washing on the line turned inside out because of the dust."
Which all reminds me of her work as Tessa Quayle in The Constant Gardener. "Ah yes," she says, "but with Constant Gardener, because I was this pain-in-the-arse do-gooder, I at least had a fictional relationship with the people on whose world we'd intruded. Here, we were literally on the run. We didn't stop and talk to them in the film, so it was kind of weird... The tone is very realistic," she adds. "I'm not playing a superhero, I don't have superpowers, I don't even have a gun. That's really what I love about it, that as this type of film goes it's not implausible at all."
Is was a big, difficult part," says Bourne director Tony Gilroy, "and the °premiere. 2012 demands were really high. The dirty secret for me is that I went on a very long, public search for the guy [Renner], but when it came to the female lead, I cast Rachel right away. You'd think there were a long line of actresses who would fit the brief, but there aren't."
Weisz and her sister Minnie, a photographer and curator, were born and brought up in Golders Green. Her father, George, an emigr6 from Hungary, was a medical inventor. Her mother, Edith, was raised in a Viennese convent and converted from Catholicism to Judaism before becoming a psychotherapist who practised from home. Sometimes Rachel and her sister would attempt to listen to what was going on in the sessions through the wall. "Oh, did I say that? That's terrible!" giggles Weisz.
Though life chez Weisz wasn't quite as intellectual as it has been made out to be in previous interviews ("Of course we didn't sit round the table discussing Freud, it was more, 'Who burnt the moussaka?'"), German was spoken by both parents, the unconscious pretty much ruled, and learning was held very, very dear. She once commented that her mother would ideally want her to be an actress and a barrister. "Yes, well, my mother has a very vivid imagination," she responds coolly, "where she can imagine these parallel universes where you can be four things at once."
Precociously bright, Weisz was also prodigiously beautiful and, after winning a modelling competition at the age of 14 ("I lied to the agency about my height, pretended I was 5ft 7in"), was offered a role in a film opposite Richard Gere. Her father threatened to leave home if she accepted it. Then, having been asked to leave both North London Collegiate and Benenden ("I used to say I was expelled because it sounds raunchier"), she attended St Pauls where, thanks mostly to a Miss Gough and a Miss Evans, she decided to knuckle down. "Miss Evans was magical," recalls Weisz, "very tough, very feminist. You know, 'the paintbrush is the phallus attacking the human body' sort of thing."
Weisz was bitten by the theatrical bug age 15, when her mother took her to see King Lear at the National Theatre, starring Bill Nighy, with whom she later worked in David Hare's Page Eight. "It was like watching Mick Jagger do Shakespeare," she says. "[Nighy] didn't know it then, but he became a sort of mentor." She formed Talking Tongues at Cambridge because "I kept auditioning for parts and not getting them. On the whole I just wasn't the star, so I thought, fuck it, I'll do my own thing." So there she'd be, in her dungarees, handing out flyers, "and then you'd get five people turning up for the performance. Oh, they were great times," she sighs, rather wistfully. "Great times."
Weisz made a huge impact on campus. "She was part of a gang of women that lots of young guys thought were intimidatingly beautiful and intelligent," recalls a fellow student."She'd give these dinner parties that everyone wanted to go to and was very much the femme fatale. I think it was important for her. She liked the attention. And she was very good at getting what she wanted. Not the average student at all..."
Garnett says Weisz has always been someone "who knows who she is in an empty room. She does not need to define herself by other people's opinions of her. She's very robust like that." Robust? Yes, but complicated, maybe even a little bit tortured, too. It's no surprise to learn she was hard-hit by her parents' divorce, she has a preoccupation with death, and that during her twenties she put herself through analysis. For five years, three times a week: "I mean, I went away in between, but yes."
The artist Harland Miller, whose work Weisz collects, remembers a road trip they took to Berlin soon after the wall came down. "I lost my wallet and the key to the apartment where we were meant to be staying. We didn't know each other very well, and she was such a good sport. Just the sort of person you want to go on a road trip with." He remembers also seeing Rachel in a club, under a strobe light, head-banging to heavy metal. "Oh yah, I'm definitely an old rocker," says Weisz. "I go and see music all the time." In fact, music is what saved her through the period in her twenties, after a stint of "being crap in TV", when she went off to LA and found herself driving around auditions. "I just wasn't getting any jobs, and when you are 23 and fearful anyway... That city, it's just full of fear."
New York, on the other hand, is very much home, filled with art by Miller, Louise Bourgeois, pieces by Raymond Pettibon, and her Oscar statuette in pride of place in the loo. For someone who once described her childhood as "emotionally claustrophobic" and admitted that friends are familiar with her "disappearing act", she seems more settled. "Did I say that?" she says, frowning slightly. "I've done so many interviews, I forget what I've said... But yes, I suppose my job is such that I can only be friends with people who understand I'm going to be away for weeks and weeks at a time."
What does being truly content mean to her? "Hmm," she says. "Someone once said to me, when I was younger, never to think the best party is somewhere else. I don't go to parties anymore, but you know that feeling of being at a party or club, and you're looking round thinking, we've got to go somewhere else? Well, you can't do that. You've got to think wherever you are is the right place to be." Which is where she is right now? "Yah, yah," she nods brightly, "but what about you, what do you think?" It's a good technique, this flipping the question back, and a little maddening, too, like a protracted game of ping-pong, but one gets the feeling she really is interested in other people. "Oh, she's genuinely curious," agrees Miller. "In another life she'd have made a great psychotherapist." Or a journalist. "Oh God, yes, I'd much rather be the interviewer," Weisz says, "but my job in a way is getting into people's skins."
After Bourne, Weisz will star in 360, reuniting her with Constant Gardener director Fernando Meirelles, before appearing next in Oz, the Great and Powerful, Disney's much awaited prequel to The Wizard of Oz, where she plays a witch alongside Mila Kunis. "I'm the really dark one, she's a mixture of the two." Michelle Williams, who has become a "new friend", is playing the Good Fairy.
In terms of holidays, the newlyweds haven't really had one yet, but the next will probably be at home in upstate New York. "We wanted to go to Italy, but I don't know..."
Does she enjoy being domestic? Does she cook? "No. But it's something I want to do. I'd love to be able to get in the kitchen and throw in spices, but I need to know some basics. I was just at the fishmonger down the road and there were these langoustines, and he said you have to chop the head and the claws, and sauté them with garlic. He was French. He said he might give me a lesson..." Tonight, meanwhile, it's big shrimp, pan-fried with chillies, garlic and noodles, and maybe a couple of glasses of red wine. Lucky Craig. "Well, it's good for relaxation, isn't it?" she says.
Can't complain, huh? "I really, really can't," she says earnestly, apologetically. "There's nothing worse than someone who complains." Nothing worse. And she doesn't. It must be hard, though, not to gloat.
