Rachel McAdams Explains Why She Wanted a Change After Shooting Mean Girls, The Notebook and Wedding Crashers

True Detective actress covers Marie Claire's June 2015 issue

By Zach Johnson May 11, 2015 3:05 PMTags
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Is the world ready for the reinvention of Rachel McAdams?

Eleven years ago, the actress starred in Mean Girls opposite the biggest teen star of the time, Lindsay Lohan. That same year, McAdams endeared herself to audiences as Allie Hamilton in The Notebook, a big screen adaptation of Nicholas Sparks' popular romance novel. In 2005, she played the female lead in Wedding Crashers, which starred Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn and earned $285 million worldwide. At the time, she was often hailed as the next generation's equivalent of Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan. For McAdams, that trifecta meant she needed to reevaluate what success meant. "I had to kind of reassess and go, 'What did I want this to be, and how did I expect it to look?'" she tells Marie Claire's June issue.

McAdams next appeared in Wes Craven's thriller Red Eye, then the dramedy The Family Stone, starring Claire Danes, Diane Keaton, Dermot Mulroney, Craig T. Nelson, Sarah Jessica Parker and Luke Wilson.

Since then, the actress has found success playing the lead role in romance movies, including 2009's The Time Traveler's Wife, 2011's Midnight in Paris, 2012's The Vow and 2013's About Time, among others. McAdams has also diversified her portfolio with roles in Sherlock Holmes, Passion and To the Wonder.

"What I love is dropping into someone else's life and exploring it. I love the exploration of someone who has such a different background from you," she tells the magazine's May issue. "That exploration runs to compassion, and to cracking yourself open and creating more understanding of how weird and amazing life is." Though she's often portrayed the likeable girl next door in her most popular films, the actress, 36, admits, "I prefer to be a villainess. There's something a bit more delicious about their wickedness."

Perhaps McAdams will get to explore that in True Detective.

McAdams plays detective Ani Bezzerides in the series, premiering June 21 on HBO. "I love that she's not the girlfriend or the wife. 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," says McAdams, referring to her latest gig as "the job of a lifetime."

Marie Claire's June issue is on newsstands May 19.