LOGIN Rachel Weisz is in a hurry.
It is 5:15 on an afternoon that started sunny and is now overcast, and she is walking towards a Starbucks in uptown Manhattan. In 45 minutes, she will appear at a charity event with Alan Cumming to “read a bit of Shakespeare.” Weisz is in Starbucks now, ordering a tall soy latte, with her cellphone clamped to her ear. She is taking the cup in her hand, and comparing Evelyn to Emin. Both are punky and anarchic. Both are modern artists. “And Tracey Emi uses her own life for her art. It’s like concrete art. She doesn’t paint a picture, she just assembles things from her life. Evelyn does think she’s as good as Tracey Emin. She’s a feminist and outspoken. That’s how she’s similar.” “Art no longer represents something beyond itself. A painting on a canvas might represent a scene, or a sculpture might represent a person, but a bed just represents a bed. It’s like a breakdown in symbolism. That says something about society. I’m not sure what.” This brand of art is also about celebrity. If the artist’s life is her art, and she is famous because of her art, celebrity becomes art. In this equation, fame, and what you do with it, becomes more important that what you did to become famous. Which is what happened to film stars a long time ago. Weisz blows across the lid of her coffee. “It’s become an extension of the work that celebrities have to do &mdash create an interesting image. It’s obviously not really them, but we like to believe that it’s them. It’s just another false self, but we want to feel like we can read Hello! magazine and have these people in our living room, and feel as if we know them. But it’s another fiction posing as something real, which I guess is what Tracey Emin’s work is. It’s not quite real, it’s like reality TV. You’re actually looking at a fiction that’s saying: ‘I’m honestly and truly real, honestly, honestly.’” She laughs, “Promise, promise, promise I’m real. And of course it’s not.”
She steps to the edge of the curb and hails a cab to Broadway and Prince. “Everyone has this hunger for something that’s really real, but the only thing that’s going to be really real is&hellipWell, I don’t know what’s real anymore.” Ask Rachel Weisz about her heroes, and she will mention Harry Houdini. “He could bust out of any jail, out of any lock , out of any situation. He was a very early poster boy using S&M as part of his appeal&mdashchains and a greased body, wearing little underwear. Also he’s Hungarian and his surname was Weiss, so my fantasy has always been that he’s a long lost cousin.” She also admires Jackie Onassis, and hopes to play her in a biopic (“We both have dead square faces.”) She is a fan of Elvis &mdash all eras: “I like him just as much when he’s fat and drug-addled and being wheeled out and forgetting his lines and laughing. He’s the ultimate performer, in that nothing could get between him and his gift.” And she loves Dolly Parton. “She’s a great example of a brilliantly-penned self. You know, a created self. Is she even heterosexual We don’t know. She’s a great creation, this blonde, happy lady.”