Rachel McAdams ‘felt guilty’ about turning down roles during her acting hiatus

April 19, 2023

“There are definitely things like, ‘I wish I had done that,'” McAdams admitted.

Rachel McAdams looks back on her career in content.

“Are You There God? I’m Margaret’ star admitted she turned down roles in films like ‘The Devil Wears Prada’, ‘Casino Royale’, ‘Mission: Impossible III’, ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Get Smart” in the mid-2000s.

“I felt guilty for not taking advantage of the opportunity I had because I knew I was in such a fortunate position,” McAdams said. Bustle that ‘Mean Girls’, ‘Wedding Crashers’ and ‘The Notebook’ were box office hits. “But I also knew it wasn’t all about my personality and what I needed to stay sane.”

McAdams moved to Canada, where he grew up, and decided to distance himself from Hollywood as a whole.

“There were definitely some unsettling moments where I wondered if I had just thrown it all away and why did I do that? It took me years to understand what I was doing intuitively,” McAdams said. “I think I’ve always felt that everything was going to be okay; it will either work or it won’t. (It made me) really help me get stronger. It helped me feel like I was taking back control. And I think that allowed me to enter through another door.”

He added: “There are definitely things like, ‘I wish I had done that.’ (But now) I step back and say, ‘This was the right person for this.'”

And McAdams struggled with the pitfalls of celebrity culture.

“You don’t go to theater school to learn how to deal with that,” McAdams said of the whole fame thing. “There is no book on how to navigate this.”

The Bustle piece also mentioned that they were overwhelmed with Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley at a 2006 Vanity Fair photo shoot where both actresses reportedly agreed to pose nude for photographer Annie Leibovitz. When McAdams found this out when he arrived on set, he took off.

The “Game Night” actress previously revealed how she reacted to the situation.

“I didn’t see any other way,” McAdams said Los Angeles Times in 2015. “It wasn’t something I’d ever seen from myself. I don’t mind doing it for a part if it makes sense if it’s not gratuitous and I think it adds to the story. But not like myself on the cover of a magazine about the most powerful young women in Hollywood.”

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