Rachel Weisz is on fire. Her new film, Disobedience, just came out, and the 48-year-old actor and Jewish mom is pregnant with her second child. Thanks to this double-whammy, the Oscar winner — who has been acting since the early 1990s and had her breakout role in 1999’s The Mummy — has been in the news everywhere.
But there’s a lot you probably don’t know about her, which is why we rounded up some cool facts about her below.
1. She is already mom to 11-year-old, Henry, whom she had with her former partner, director Darren Aronofsky. The pair were together from 2001 until 2010.
2. She has been married to James Bond actor Daniel Craig for seven years, although they had been friends “for years.” Weisz told Marie Claire that it wasn’t exactly love at first sight, saying, “It wasn’t really like that. We’d been friends for ages.”
Rachel Weisz, 48, expecting first child with Daniel Craig https://t.co/7NEL3mKYsx pic.twitter.com/1WDbpIfsNO
— Page Six (@PageSix) April 20, 2018
3. Weisz’s first-ever love scene with a woman is in Disobedience with costar Rachel McAdams.
Rachel Weisz is outstanding. Rachel McAdams is a revelation. Critics are raving about #Disobedience – in select theaters April 27. pic.twitter.com/j3TZX7Xjyj
— Disobedience Movie (@DisobedienceMov) April 17, 2018
4. Weisz’s mother, a teacher and therapist, converted from Catholicism to Judaism. Her father, an engineer and inventory, came from an Orthodox Jewish family in Budapest. He moved to London as a child during World War II.
5. In order to tell more stories centered around women, Weisz started a production company called LC6, telling the Times that “there’s just a dearth of ones about women. I love women. Women are just really fascinating and different from men.”
6. She won an Oscar for her performance in 2005’s The Constant Gardener as Tessa Quayle, a human-rights activist. She starred alongside Ralph Fiennes; the film is based off the book of the same name by John Le Carre.
7. Weisz, who isn’t on social media, didn’t aspire to get married. She said, “I never thought I would get married. It was not an ambition of mine. It was the opposite. I couldn’t relate to romantic comedies — marriage seems to be the whole point of them… Then it just happened, happily, at a more mature moment.”
8. If she were a record, she told the Times she’d “be a Beethoven piano concerto.”
9. It’s rumored she and Craig sparked their romance in 2010 when they starred together in the thriller Dream House. They played a married couple. Foreshadowing, anyone?
10. She doesn’t think there should be a female James Bond, but maybe not for the reason you think. Why? Because women should get “their own stories.” Fair.
12. Weisz believes botox should “be banned for actors, as steroids are for sportsmen. “Acting is all about expression,” she has said. “Why would you want to iron out a frown?”
13. Weisz started modeling when she was 14. Now, she models for fashion designer Narciso Rodriguez.
14. When she was 14, she was offered a part alongside Richard Gere in the movie King David, but she turned it down.
15. Weisz starred in Aronofsky’s The Fountain, which she was excited about, saying, “Darren makes divisive films, so I thought it was only to be expected that this was going to divide audiences and especially the press.”
16. Weisz was schoolmates with Sasha Baron Cohen at Cambridge.
17. In Bryan Adams’s 1991 video for “There Will Never Be Another Tonight,” Weisz makes an appearance (check around minute 1:50).
