Rachel Weisz has come a long way since The Mummy. Though her breakout role as a sexy librarian in the late Nineties action flick was all coy Egyptology and stolen desert kisses, for the past decade, Weisz, now 55 and already an Oscar, Bafta and Golden Globe winner, has been choosing projects that prioritise the female gaze, from queer romances to midlife sexual obsession. In the process, she has made herself both an LGBTQ+ icon and an actor beloved by women of all sexualities.
“With roles for women in the past, I’ve found them very oversimplified,” she told Porter magazine in 2023. “Women pursuing pleasure is really interesting to me… female desire is really interesting, and I think we don’t get enough of that.”
So, what is it precisely that people love about Weisz? In recent years, she has chosen a lot of queer roles, instilling in her characters a sense of autonomy and instinctive sensuality that resists the objectifying of traditional male gaze cinema. In Disobedience (2017), Weisz played Ronit, a Jewish woman estranged from her community for rejecting orthodoxy, who rekindles a (secret) affair with a now-married female friend. A scene where the pair finally have sex is cleverly shot almost entirely without nudity, two fingers up to any voyeuristic viewers expecting the usual parade of bums and boobs.
Then, in Restoration drama The Favourite (2018), she was Lady Sarah Churchill, not an object of male desire, but a woman wielding her sexual charms and friendship for the top spot in Queen Anne’s affections. And in the Amazon show Dead Ringers (2023), she played two twin gynaecologists, one of whom has a tender lesbian relationship that helps her separate emotionally from her sister.
Weisz appeared as twins in the Amazon show ‘Dead Ringers’ (Photo: Bleecker Street /AP)Weisz told Advocate magazine: “It can just get really boring watching heterosexual people, whether you’re gay or not… particularly when the woman is the object of desire rather than the agent of desire. That’s what we’ve been spoon-fed – that the woman is the object of the male subjectivity, of his desire and passion. Oh, I’m bored of that. Really bored.”
In Weisz’s new project, Vladimir, she has totally subverted the idea of the woman being the object of desire, and also shown that her ability to shake off the constraints of the male gaze isn’t limited to simply removing men from the equation.
Based on the wildly popular 2022 book by Julia May Jonas, this highly bingeable and surprisingly funny new Netflix show features Weisz as an English Professor in her fifties, who becomes utterly obsessed with the new faculty member, Vladimir, played by entertainment’s favourite hot boy about town, Leo Woodall. We aren’t told her character’s name – she is, perhaps, more raw appetite than actual human. It’s a subversive story of desire and power; the usual rules of age and gender don’t apply.
Woodall has already taken his shirt off and dived into a pool for Bridget Jones (in last year’s Mad About The Boy) and given us charming, damaged Dexter in Netflix’s smash hit One Day. But this is probably the first time we’ve seen him so outrageously objectified: under Weisz’s character’s gaze, he really is nothing but a piece of meat (albeit a piece of meat whose intermittent academic musings and kind manner are part of his appeal).
In ‘Vladimir’ Weisz plays an academic who becomes obsessed with a young colleague played by Leo Woodall (Photo: Netflix)From Weisz’s character’s viewpoint, the camera zooms in on his beefy thighs, slows down for the swivel of his hair or a damp armpit (which she leans in to sniff). We don’t hear her thoughts on Vlad, we just see him. In moments imagined by her, he is there, lifting her into bookcases, hiking up her skirts, so suddenly that it is almost as if she is being assaulted by these fantasies, as if they are beyond her control.
The tension between control and submission, between looking and being wanted, is central to the female gaze, and Weisz leans into it. All this objectifying doesn’t make her character powerful. Instead, Weisz makes her a rather passive creature, yearning for Vladimir, lustfully imagining their encounters but never initiating them.
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She pictures him as a dominant lover, herself as submitting to his will. At one point, he asks her what she wants, and she replies. “Stop asking me what I want.” Although she talks about control, and the middle-aged loss of it, all the time – control over her body, control over her child, control over men’s erections – what she really wants is just for someone she fancies to take charge. She lusts not just after Vlad, but after surrender.
While we love Weisz all the more for her real-life intelligence and protectiveness over her private life (she married Daniel Craig in 2011 and had a baby with him aged 48), she has worked hard to open up new avenues for women on screen (she also produced Dead Ringers, Disobedience and Vladimir), and her lionisation as a women’s woman is seriously well-earned.
And although she is constantly looking for new ways to shake off the male gaze, what her characters have in common is a lack of performativeness. She is so good at creating an intimacy with her audience, where we can view her characters’ thoughts and bodies through the prism of our own female experience. Whether her characters are busy chasing political clout in an 18th-century court, or just the chance to feel the touch of a beautiful young man, Weisz’s gift is that she always makes it as much about power as it is about sex.
‘Vladimir’ is streaming on Netflix
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