Rachel Weisz: Anatomy of a Lesbian Icon

Rachel Weisz: Anatomy of a Lesbian Icon

by GayJoy staff writer Kira Deshler

In 1999 the action-adventure film The Mummy was released, launching its star Brendon Fraser to international fame. In 2018, Yorgos Lanthimos’ off-kilter period piece The Favourite premiered, securing its star Olivia Colman the Oscar for Best Actress. If you’re anything like me, you may recall these two films for different reasons – as career-defining moments for one of the world’s most prominent lesbian icons: Rachel Weisz.

The 51-year-old Weisz (a perfect age for standom in the eyes of both sapphics and gay men, by the way) was born in London to an Austrian mother and a Hungarian father. Though she had appeared in several films prior, 1999’s The Mummy was her first big break. She has been married to James Bond himself, Daniel Craig, for a decade, and was previously married to director Darren Aronofsky. These details in and of themself – besides the fact that she is beautiful and middle-aged and British – do not properly explain her current status as a lesbian icon. I’m here to investigate this issue further.

As I’ve suggested above, Weisz’s turn in The Mummy was the moment she first captured many of our hearts. In the film, Weisz plays Evelyn Carnahan, a posh librarian and aspiring Egyptologist who hooks up (literally and figuratively) with Brendan Fraser’s Rick O’Connell as they travel to Egypt and accidentally awaken a high priest. Her lack of eyebrows aside, I have it on good authority that Weisz’s role in this film was many people’s gay awakening. This is not surprising – she’s beautiful, smart, adventurous, and in The Mummy Returns she swordfights with Patricia Velásquez (who happens to be a lesbian herself) while wearing a bikini. Brendan Fraser’s role in the film also makes it a particularly important piece of bisexual canon – they are both hot and charming in this film, and Fraser’s wonderful portrayal of a himbo separates him from the macho action stars that preceded (and followed) him.

The queerness of The Mummy franchise has indeed been well-recorded; an article published last month in i-D argued that The Mummy Returns is gay, actually. Louis Staples, who wrote the piece, argues that The Mummy Returns is popular among both queer men and women, in part because of the aforementioned sword fighting and himbo energy, among other things. Film critic Guy Lodge suggests that the precedent she set in this film was perhaps the beginning of her queer following and that echoes of Evelyn can be found in her later roles. “There has always been an independent, self-possessed quality even to her romantic leads that could read as queer, in its rejection of patriarchal power,” Lodge notes. Certainly, as evidenced by the sword fighting she takes up in The Mummy Returns, Evelyn is far from a damsel in distress. And, if you need any more evidence that The Mummy is an important factor in Weisz’s lesbian icon status, look no further than the cultural significance of sword lesbians. Indeed, there is even some actual evidence that Weisz’s lesbian icon status preceded the sapphic Weisz renaissance of 2017/2018 (more on that below) – a group of lesbians actually voted her the sexiest woman all the way back in 2008 in a poll published in an English newspaper.

Following The Mummy franchise, Weisz starred in the fantasy noir Constantine along with queer icon Keanu Reeves in 2005, and in 2006 she secured her first Oscar for her portrayal of Ralph Fiennes’ dead wife in The Constant Gardener. In 2008 Weisz starred in the rom-com Definitely Maybe, in which I’ve been informed she plays a bisexual (I myself will never watch this movie because it stars Ryan Reynolds). Jo Livingstone argues that a turning point in Weisz’s career was when she starred in Yorgos Lanthimos’ exceedingly strange The Lobster in 2015, after which the quality of films she appeared in greatly increased.

McAdams (left) and Weisz (right) doing some lesbian handholding in Disobedience.

For our purposes, the turning point in Weisz’s career as a lesbian icon – post-Mummy that is – came with the release of Disobedience in 2017 and Lanthimos’ The Favourite the following year. If you aren’t familiar, Disobedience follows Ronit (Weisz) as she travels home to London after the death of her rabbi father, returning to the Orthodox Jewish community she left years prior. While there, she reunites with Esti (Rachel McAdams) her childhood friend and lover. Obviously, a beautiful and tragic romance ensues. The film was generally received positively upon its release, and has become a particular favorite among sapphic cinema fans. Much like the famous peach scene from Call Me By Your Name, the scene from Disobedience that garnered the most attention is one where Ronit spits in Esti’s mouth during their first and only sex scene.

The film itself is obviously an important artifact in the Rachel Weisz lesbian canon, but Weisz’s own discussion of the film is perhaps equally as important. The release of Disobedience began a several-year-long run – it continued during the press tour for The Favourite – of Weisz essentially saying gay things in public (in relation to her gay films, of course). In seemingly every interview on the Disobedience press tour, Weisz made it a point to bring up how she read “a lot of lesbian literature” while searching for her next film (Weisz also produced the movie). Weisz also talked incessantly about the Disobedience sex scene in nearly every interview I watched about the film. In one interview she simply said “The sex was really good, I guess,” and in another, she waxed poetic about the love scene between her and McAdams being “emotional, romantic, spiritual, passionate, and full of heart and longing,” to use only a few adjectives. (Many of these moments were compiled in a YouTube video called Rachel Weisz Giving Gays their Rights, which you can watch below).

These sapphic soliloquies continued during the press tour for The Favourite, which also received a lot of awards season buzz that year. In The Favourite, Weisz plays Lady Sarah, a close friend, advisor, and sometimes lover to Queen Anne (Olivia Colman) who finds she must vie for the Queen’s affection with newcomer Abigail (Emma Stone). Apart from the actual lesbian loving that occurs in the film, Weisz also captured sapphics’ hearts by dressing like what I can only describe as a gay pirate – specifically one with anger issues who knows how to erotically brandish a weapon. (See, again, sword lesbians and the “step on me” discourse).

One of the most famous moments from the press tour occurred at the Golden Globes, during which Weisz, Colman, and Stone got up on stage and made lesbian innuendoes for a full minute, with Weisz gleefully noting that she gave Colman “a good tongue lashing.” The Favourite press tour also gave us one of the most iconic Weisz moments to date, which is the Hollywood Roundtable supercut of Kathryn Hahn staring lovingly at Weisz for two minutes while the Carol soundtrack plays. While it is perhaps more of a gay moment for Hahn than for Weisz, Weisz’s central role in the meme is not accidental. Indeed, many noted that they too would have done the same, if in Hahn’s position. The Favourite also gave us the iconic “gay rights” moment, wherein fans asked various queerly associated celebrities to yell “gay rights” into the camera, starting, of course, with Colman and Weisz. (Colman also has a strong sapphic following, which I do not have the time or space to get into here).

As a result of the fervor surrounding these two films, writer and humorist Jill Gutowitz declared in 2019 that Rachel Weisz had become the Unofficial Straight LGBTQ Ambassador. Earlier that year, the satirical site Reductress published an article headlined Woman Cozily Cupping Mug Secretly Thinking About Getting Absolutely Railed by Rachel Weisz. In particular, sapphic fans seem to have latched on to the assertive presence she embodies in The Favourite, and to a lesser extent in Disobedience, with Gutowitz declaring that “every day, it seems we find new and innovative ways that we want Weisz to harm us.” This specific discourse is itself part of a larger trend wherein fans plead for various celebrities to violently assault them (read Jia Tolentino’s piece on this phenomenon in The New Yorker), but it seems to have coalesced around Weisz in an especially forceful fashion around this time.

To be sure, much of the sapphic fervor surrounding Weisz is likely the result of the three roles I’ve just discussed – The Mummy, Disobedience, and The Favourite, two of which are explicitly queer and one only implicitly so. But it’s also clear that how she conducts herself outside of these films is part of why she’s so celebrated. Indeed, part of her appeal seems to be her obliviousness to her own charm and, relatedly, the almost comical frequency with which she makes sapphic comments. (“I love women...I enjoy their company”).

To be fair, I don’t necessarily think these comments mean she is queer herself, nor do I think that is the root of her lesbian following. In fact, sometimes it seems to me that the more someone makes these offhanded “gay remarks” the higher the chance they’re actually not queer, precisely because they don’t comprehend the effect such comments might have. (You might recall the time Brie Larson obliviously asked “how do I top lesbians?” at a panel and noted sapphic Tessa Thompson immediately knew what she had to do). On the other hand, if my sources are correct, Weisz did once say she wanted to be a lesbian icon in a now-deleted interview with AfterEllen in 2009, so perhaps she is not so oblivious after all.

Regardless of Weisz’s level of awareness of and participation in her own lesbian icon status, her position in the sapphic hall of fame is seemingly unimpeachable. (Not that anyone has tried. To impeach her, that is). My bet - her honor won’t need defending anytime soon.

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