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Rachel McAdams ‘Felt Guilty’ Turning Down Roles During Acting Break: Was I ‘Throwing It All Away?’

Samantha Bergeson
·2-min read

Rachel McAdams is looking back at her career in content.

The “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” star opened up about turning down roles in films like “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Casino Royale,” “Mission: Impossible III,” “Iron Man,” and “Get Smart” as part of an acting break in the mid-2000s.

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“I felt guilty for not capitalizing on the opportunity that I was being given, because I knew I was in such a lucky spot,” McAdams told Bustle of coming off “Mean Girls,” “Wedding Crashers,” and “The Notebook” as blockbusters. “But I also knew it wasn’t quite jiving with my personality and what I needed to stay sane.”

McAdams relocated to Canada where she grew up and opted to step away from Hollywood as a whole.

“There were definitely some anxious moments of wondering if I was just throwing it all away, and why was I doing that? It’s taken years to understand what I intuitively was doing,” McAdams said. “I guess I always had a sense that it would be OK; either it’s going to work out or it’s not. [It made me] really helped me feel empowered. It helped me feel like I was taking back some control. And I think it sort of allowed me to come in from a different doorway.”

She added, “There’s certainly things like ‘I wish I’d done that.’ [But now] I step back and go, ‘That was the right person for that.'”

And the pitfalls of celebrity culture was something McAdams grappled with.

“You don’t go to theater school to learn about how to deal with that,” McAdams said of fame as a whole. “There’s no book on how to navigate that.”

The Bustle piece also mentioned her experience feeling overwhelmed with a 2006 Vanity Fair photoshoot with Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley, where both actresses allegedly had agreed to pose nude for photographer Annie Leibovitz. Upon learning this when arriving at the shoot, McAdams walked off set.

The “Game Night” actress previously opened up about her reaction to the situation.

“I didn’t see any other way,” McAdams told the Los Angeles Times in 2015. “It wasn’t something I could ever possibly see myself doing. I have no issues doing it for a part if it makes sense, if it’s not gratuitous and I think it’s adding to the story. But not as myself on the cover of a magazine about Hollywood’s most powerful young women.”

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