Rachel McAdams is one of my favorite actresses. I love “The Notebook.” Is it one of her favorites, too?
—Elizabeth York, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
According to Rachel McAdams, 35, “The Notebook” will always hold a special place in her heart. She says, “I’m very grateful for that film, and I feel very lucky to have been a part of it. It’s a privilege to be a part of something that reaches people. We certainly didn’t know that going into it . And the amount of men that come up and confess that they secretly liked the movie just delights me to no end. I never get enough of that.”
“The Notebook” helped propel the London, Ontario, Canada-born actress’ career, which now includes the films “The Vow,” “Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows,” “Midnight in Paris,” “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” “The Lucky Ones,” “Wedding Crashers,” and her most recent release, “About Time.”
If you look at the list closely, McAdams has starred in three movies that feature time travel: “About Time,” “Midnight in Paris,” and “The Time Traveler’s Wife,” but funnily enough, she is never the one who gets to transport to a different era.
“It’s a fun construct, isn’t it?,” she says. “It’s an enticing thing to indulge and fantasize about. It’s like winning the lottery and thinking about what you would go back and do again.”
One of the things she would choose to do is get better acquainted with her maternal grandparents, who died when she was quite young.
But she also thinks that embracing life as it happens instead of trying to go back and fix things has its own merits. “It’s that whole idea that your mistakes make you stronger and better,” she says. “It’s the messiness of life that ultimately leads you to the most interesting things. Everyone asks what would you do over. I don’t know because then you wouldn’t have a story to tell. And if you did everything over and made it perfect, what would you talk about?”
