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Rachel McAdams is by all accounts impossible not to like, a bubbly, intelligent, charming talent of an actor who seems able to do just about anything she wants on screen. While she’s played the love interest plenty of times, she’s also taken some serious roles that have truly come to define her as one of the more reliable and challenging women working today in movies. While she will mostly likely be associated with her breakout romantic drama The Notebook, she deserves credit for reaching past what could have easily set her in stone in countless roles like it afterward. With that in mind, agreeing the was certainly good in that movie, here are six movie roles of Rachel McAdams that prove she can do even better.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”NEXT” ]
Midnight in Paris
While this 2011 romantic drama was really a showcase for lead Owen Wilson, he playing a writer named Gil Pender, believing himself born in the wrong time and thus magically transported back to the 1920s while visiting Paris, McAdams is equally good. She plays Gil’s fiancée Inez, a woman hardly interested in the real culture of City of Lights, more obsessed with the superficiality of it all. That she’s an entirely unlikable person is really just a tip of the hat to McAdams’ great range, making her loads of fun to watch as she sneers and complains her way through the movie. We’re meant to dislike her and she makes it easy to do so. Great work.
READ MORE: The Doomed Detective in Midnight in Paris [/nextpage][nextpage title=”NEXT” ]
State of Play
Playing second fiddle to Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck, not to mention the incomparable Helen Mirren, McAdams is Della Frye, a rookie writer at the Washington Globe, where hardcore veteran Cal McAffrey (Crowe) is investigating a murder involving Congressman Stephen Collins (Affleck). She’s a lowly blogger for the paper and has to earn her way into the ranks of respect with McAffery, who quickly learns that she’s more than she seems. Showing off some impressive dramatic skills outside a romance film, she establishes that she more than just a pretty face but an actor with great range and even more presence.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”NEXT” ]
MORNING GLORY
Say what you will about this mostly contrived comedy/drama, McAdams is terrific, breathing a whole boatload of life into this would-be generic fluff. She plays workaholic Becky Fuller, a morning news producer hired at the bottom-of-the-ratings show to try and turn it around, struggling to get hosts Mike Pomeroy (Harrison Ford) and Colleen Peck (Diane Keaton) to like each other. While the movie is mostly standard and uninspired, there’s no slowing it down with McAdams barreling it forward with a hugely dynamic take on the trope-ish character and earning high praise for her efforts. She’s just so fun to watch.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”next” ]
MEAN GIRLS
The one that put her on the map, this comedy is widely considered to be one of the best of its kind with a razor-sharp script and biting commentary. McAdams is Regina George, a monster of a girl who will do anything stay the most popular in school, in the processing, becoming de facto leader of the Plastics, a clique of über rich girls who rule the land, taking in new girl Cady Heron (Lindsay Lohan) as their next member, though not goes as planned. McAdams is deliciously demented and makes quite impression in a film cast with many young and future stars.[/nextpage][nextpage title=”next” ]
SPOTLIGHT
Joining an ensemble cast of heavy hitters, McAdams earns her first Academy Award nomination for her work as Sacha Pfeiffer, a reporter for The Boston Globe and part of the team that uncovered conspiracy of crimes in the church. Alongside Michael Keaton and Mark Ruffalo, McAdams stretches herself as an actor and delivers easily one of the best performances of her career, in a film that earned Best Picture. The only female lead in the film, she is both powerful and identifiable, her impassioned and emotional turn one that changed many perceptions of what she was capable of on screen. This is a great performance.[/nextpage] [nextpage title=”NEXT” ]
ABOUT TIME
So yes, this innocuous little romance is really much more than it seems, a story not hardly at all about the relationship between a young woman named Mary (McAdams) and Tim (Domhnall Gleeson), but rather him and his father (Bill Nighy). Aside from the magical elements of time travel, this is truly a touching and fulfilling movie that is loaded with surprises, not the least of which is McAdams earnest and wholly convincing portrayal of a woman in love and the consequences of such. Flipping all expectations of the quirky love interest, she redefines it and makes About Time one of the best ever made in the genre.
READ MORE: That Moment In About Time [/nextpage]