Rachel Weisz leads the new Netflix limited series “Vladimir” as its unnamed protagonist, a tenured college professor who develops an obsessive attraction to her new, younger colleague (Leo Woodall). “Vladimir,” like 2023’s “Dead Ringers” before it, works just as much as a showcase for Weisz’s talent and range as it does a compelling and entertaining series in its own right. Weisz is the show’s fourth-wall-breaking narrator and the vessel for its ideas about female desire and lust, and she juggles all of its many demands of her with a deceptive kind of ease.
It is not the first time she has done something like that, either. In fact, in honor of her star turn in “Vladimir,” here are Weisz’s best performances, ranked.
7. Sue Lynne in “My Blueberry Nights” (2007)
Weisz has a small part in “My Blueberry Nights,” “In the Mood for Love” director Wong Kar-wai‘s flawed, first and only English-language film, but she nearly steals the entire show. Appearing in the film’s Memphis sequence, Weisz plays Sue Lynne, an attractive Southern girl whose lovelorn police officer ex-husband (David Straithairn) cannot accept that she has moved on from him. Straithairn’s Arnie dominates much of this chapter of “My Blueberry Nights,” though director Wong does give Weisz a film entrance for the ages early on, but it is after tragedy strikes — and forever separates — the already doomed couple that Weisz takes center stage.
The film’s Memphis saga concludes with a 5-minute monologue that Wong shoots entirely as an unbroken close-up on Weisz’s face. The actress proves deserving of such a moment, filling “My Blueberry Nights” momentarily with the tragic depth that eludes it for much of its runtime. Like many of Wong’s greatest characters, Sue Lynne emerges as someone torn apart by her conflicting desire for love and her fear of it. Unlike most of the characters in “My Blueberry Nights,” she ends up a fitting addition to her director’s timeless collection of heartbroken cinematic figures.
6. Beverly and Elliot Mantle in “Dead Ringers” (2023)
It takes a certain level of courage to not only remake a film by a director as singular as David Cronenberg, but also play two characters who were already portrayed by Jeremy Irons. Only someone as fearless as Weisz could have done so, and only a performer as skilled and daring as her could have stuck the landing. She does just that, though, in “Dead Ringers,” writer Alice Birch’s 2023 limited series adaptation of the Cronenberg film of the same name. Weisz leads the series as Beverly and Elliot Mantle, identical twin gynecologists who, unbeknownst to everyone else, have a habit of swapping places.
Love and work eventually complicate that dynamic, and “Dead Ringers” asks Weisz to carry all of its drama solely on her back. She does just that, giving two performances that not only command your attention and uphold the transgressive spirit of the larger show, but which contain all the roiling notes of confidence, insecurity, intelligence and toxic codependency that alternately keep her characters afloat and threaten to sink them altogether. In “Dead Ringers,” Weisz, in other words, makes taking on a gargantuan task seem easy.
5. Kathryn Bolkovac in “The Whistleblower” (2010)
Weisz leads 2010’s “The Whistleblower” as Kathryn Bolkovac, a Nebraskan police officer who is recruited to serve as a United Nations peacekeeper in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina in the late 1990s. During her time there, she uncovers a sex trafficking ring that is not only engaged in by members of the American military contracting corporation that hired her in the first place, but also facilitated by them. Based on a true story, the film follows Weisz’s Kathryn as she tries, at great risk to her own safety, to shut the trafficking operation down and save its female victims from the sexual and physical violence regularly inflicted upon them by the ring’s leaders.
“The Whistleblower” has, unfortunately, only become more relevant over the past 16 years, and Weisz’s lead performance in it is a marvel of empathy and humanity. That is no better exemplified than in the film’s climactic scene, in which Kathryn begs one of the trafficked girls to ignore her abuser’s threats and come with her. Weisz gives a performance that feels completely authentic and present, and you feel her character’s escalating desperation and heartbreak in your whole body.
4. Tessa Quayle in “The Constant Gardener” (2005)
Weisz won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress in 2006 for her performance opposite Ralph Fiennes in director Fernando Meirelles’ “The Constant Gardener.” The actress appears almost entirely in flashbacks in the film, as Fiennes’ British diplomat Justin Quayle spends its present-day scenes trying to uncover the truth behind the murder of his wife, Weisz’s Tessa. Despite that, Weisz becomes the heart beating at the center of “The Constant Gardener.”
Her performance as Tessa Quayle, a headstrong activist willing to put her own life on the line to expose a conspiracy involving human deaths knowingly caused by reckless clinical drug trials, combines the same cheshire cat-like willfulness present in many of her best roles with an unexpected, anxious kind of energy. Weisz’s ability to hold and communicate all of those conflicting emotions at once is what allows her character to become a three-dimensional person, rather than just an idealized woman grieved by Fiennes’ Justin. It is also why she rightly won an Oscar for her work in “The Constant Gardener.”
3. Ronit Krushka in “Disobedience” (2018)
Director Sebastián Lelio’s 2018 queer romantic drama “Disobedience” hinges on its three lead performances from stars Rachel Weisz, Rachel McAdams and Alessandro Nivola. As impressive as both McAdams and Nivola are in “Disobedience,” though, it is Weisz’s turn as the film’s de facto lead, Ronit, that propels it forward at every turn. An exiled photographer who returns to her home Orthodox Jewish community in London after her father’s death, Weisz’s Ronit is a woman haunted by loneliness, shame and the distance that was put between herself and her family.
Weisz carries all of those feelings in her performance. They bubble up in moments of isolation and reflection, as well as in the private romantic moments she shares with McAdams’ Esti, which reveal the full scope of why Weisz’s Ronit was banished in the first place. One of the most affecting queer romances of the past 10 years, “Disobedience” soars not just because of the palpable chemistry between McAdams and Weisz, but because of how thoroughly Weisz and Lelio ground it in the resurfaced pain and loneliness of its heroine-returned-home. Weisz gives one of the most vulnerable, unvarnished performances of her career in “Disobedience,” and it also happens to be one of her best.
2. Lady Sarah in “The Favourite” (2018)
The same year “Disobedience” was released, Weisz gave a wildly different, even more impressive performance in director Yorgos Lanthimos’ blackly comic “All About Eve” riff, “The Favourite.” Weisz stars in the film as Lady Sarah, a Duchess who finds her lifelong relationship with Queen Anne of England (Olivia Colman) threatened by the arrival of Abigail Hill (Emma Stone), an ambitious woman hellbent on securing a life of leisure and luxury. Colman was the only one of the film’s three leads to take home an Oscar for “The Favourite,” but subsequent rewatches reveal that it is Weisz’s performance that has the most to offer and parse through of all of the movie’s star turns.
Like Bette Davis in “All About Eve,” Weisz is asked to strike the right balance between pride, insecurity and heartbreak, and she does so without breaking much of a sweat. Manipulative and yet honest, calculating and yet loving, Weisz presents her “Favourite” figure as she is without offering the audience any simple answer for her behavior. The fact that she does that while also chewing up every mischievous, spectacular line of dialogue that writers Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara give her only makes her performance in “The Favourite” that much more impressive.
1. Hester Collyer in “The Deep Blue Sea” (2011)
Rachel Weisz is delicate yet strong, lovestruck and yet heartbroken in writer-director Terence Davies’ 2011 masterpiece “The Deep Blue Sea.” An adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play of the same name, Weisz stars in the film as the wife of a judge (Simon Russell Beale) who decides to upset her entire life in 1950s post-war England over a passionate affair with a dashing, mercurial RAF pilot (Tom Hiddleston). The film is about much more than just a doomed romance. Weisz’s Hester is a woman who, in her desperate, reckless desire to live life by her own rules, does not fit into the society around her. That emotional separation is reflected in Weisz’s performance.
There is a slow stillness to Weisz’s turn, a taught manner to the way she moves in “The Deep Blue Sea,” which she never deviates from except for the moments when she uses her face and her voice — a tiny waver here, a sharp, sudden inhale there — to betray the growing unease of her character. The disciplined nature of her performance is what makes Hester’s eventual, small acts of defiance land with such empowering force. Like her character, Weisz is walking a tightrope throughout much of “The Deep Blue Sea,” and to watch her performance deepen and evolve in the film’s second half is to witness a human transformation that feels real and true. Only a truly great performance could provoke the kind of emotional involvement that “The Deep Blue Sea” achieves.
