They admired each other for years, but it wasn't until Rachel Weisz and Susan Lynch made a film together that they became best friends. Craig McLean finds out what makes them a star combination
 

RACHEL WEISZ and Susan Lynch first met at a barn dance around six years ago. The occasion was a Wild West party hosted by actress Janet McTeer. The guests were in fancy dress, hired stuntmen were doing a rootin'-tootin' shoot-out, and the country music was flying.

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Girls on film: Susan Lynch and Rachel Weisz starring together in the new film Beautiful Creatures
 
 

Weisz was struck by Lynch's waist-length black hair and the mad Irish dancing of her and her boyfriend. She recognised her from a recent leading role in Wedekind's Lulu. It was her favourite play. 'So I went up and told them they were the most in love couple I'd ever seen!' says Weisz with an embarrassed giggle.

They would bump into each other again on other occasions, at theatre and film auditions over the intervening years. But it was only when they met - finally, properly - on the set of the new movie Beautiful Creatures that their friendship was cemented.

Weisz: 'It's really difficult because we always sound like we're madly in love with each other. My agent did actually say to me...'

Lynch: 'Oh, you've got to tell this story!'

Weisz: 'I was seeing someone new and it was a bit of a secret. After a while, my agent went, "Rachel, I've just got to ask you... I don't mean to be intrusive, but [whisper] is it Susan?" I'd obviously spent the whole lunch going, "La la la Susan, la la la Susan" and I went, "No, no. No, it's not actually!" '

Rachel Weisz is the 30-year-old London girl who shot into the Hollywood limelight with her star turn in 1999's summer blockbuster The Mummy (alongside John Hannah and Brendan Fraser). She has - in the tabloid parlance - 'been linked with' Alessandro Nivola (her co-star in her best movie yet, Michael Winterbottom's I Want You from 1998). More 'famously', she went out with Neil Morrissey for 18 months after starring with him in the Euro 96 TV drama My Summer With Des.

She lives in Primrose Hill as, it seems, a young British actor must these days, and goes out with Sam Mendes, the dashing Oscar-winning director of American Beauty. She's pretty much managed to keep the relationship under wraps, even though they first went out when they worked together at the Donmar Warehouse, where he is artistic director, five years ago.

She finds Hollywood and the whole film industry - particularly the way women are treated and used - 'repellent'. Her Hungarian stepmother is always saying, in her heavy accent, 'You are not for sale.'

Weisz claims her harshest critic is her father, a 'medical inventor' who, like her Austrian psychotherapist mother, fled Hitler and came to London. 'I think he always thought I shouldn't be acting until he saw me in [Tennessee Williams's] Suddenly Last Summer. He didn't really ever say what he wanted me to do. Now he says he thinks my personality wouldn't be suited to anything else.'

Lynch, 29, lives near Corrinshego, near Newry, the Northern Irish town where she grew up and where her family still live. Her mother is an expat too, an Italian who met her Northern Irish husband in Coventry.

Lynch moved back to Ireland after eight years in London. In the past she has described moving home as 'wonderful. Being [there] rather than in London or LA is about having space for other people's lives as well as your own.' Now she says, 'It's great. It's like having a double life. It's very stabilising.'

While in London she completed a spate of television work, and movies including Celtic fairy story The Secret of Roan Inish, Interview With the Vampire and Waking Ned. Last year she starred in Nora alongside Ewan McGregor, as the eponymous wife of James Joyce. 'It's good,' she says of these varied roles, 'to jump from different skin to different skin rather than feel you're playing a magnified version of yourself all the time.'

Having spent nearly six years almost knowing each other, and admiring each other's work from afar, Weisz and Lynch finally got the chance to work together just over a year ago on Beautiful Creatures. This pacey little thriller is the first output from DNA Films, the lottery-backed company set up by Duncan Kenworthy (producer of Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill) and Andrew Macdonald (producer of Trainspotting and The Beach).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Beautiful creatures: Susan Lynch [left] and Rachel Weisz [right] are friends because they understand each other not because they go to the same showbiz parties
 
 

'It's the same with casting a romance, or male/female parts: you never actually know if the chemistry will work,' says Macdonald. 'It was absolutely necessary to the success of the movie that Susan and Rachel hit it off - and it was good fortune that they did, immediately. They were working with a first-time director, in Glasgow, a city they didn't really know, with a crew [of Scottish men] who knew each other, and those elements meant they looked to each other for support. You dream about having actors who respond genuinely to each other's ideas.'

Beautiful Creatures has been dubbed 'a Scottish Thelma & Louise', a lazily reductive sobriquet that is less to do with the occasionally daffy story of two women whose abusive boyfriends get them tangled up with murder, ransom money and each other, than it is to do with the shortage of films with two good roles for female leads.

Since filming in Glasgow finished a year ago, Weisz and Lynch have seen each other as often as divergent international film star careers allow. Recently Weisz has been in Morocco and Shepperton Studios, filming The Mummy Returns. She was also in America for two months, taking part in a New York press junket for her next movie, the Second World War sniper thriller Enemy at the Gates (starring Jude Law and Joseph Fiennes). She also undertook a road trip through the Deep South: Nashville, New Orleans and Memphis.

Lynch, meanwhile, has been in Wales, filming Happy Now, a murder thriller that spans the Eighties and Nineties and features a group of smalltown friends.

On the day of our rendezvous in a Knightsbridge hotel the pair haven't seen each other since last August, when Beautiful Creatures premiered at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Their mutual hysteria is instant, infectious and very, very loud. Weisz is wearing a necklace in the shape of the letters 'EP', and has got Lynch an Elvis make-up bag from Graceland.

According to Lynch, Weisz has 'Film Star Quality. I look at Rachel and she reminds me of those old film actresses. But that's not just who she is for me. It's that thing of when you get to know people what they do doesn't become who they are.'

Weisz: 'We don't really talk about acting, ever.'

Lynch: 'We talk about boys and things.'

Weisz: 'We don't sit and go [pompous voice], "What was your motivation?" '

Lynch: 'I think what we've got in common is that we've both got a healthy cynicism about what we do. What does it all matter?'

Lynch is stretched out on her hotel suite sofa, tight white top and burgundy leather trousers, red fluffy hair tie pushed up over bicep, hands behind head, smoking, chatting, laughing.

Weisz is stretched out on another sofa, grey long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans, hands behind her head, chunky pink belt and midriff showing, chatting, guffawing. I might as well not be here.

Weisz and Lynch's Beautiful Creatures characters are Petula and Dorothy. Petula is a trophy girlfriend who is saved by Dorothy from being strangled by her drunk older lover. Dorothy was about to board the London bus to escape her drug-addict boyfriend. Mercy mission turns to murderous farce: one boyfriend kills himself by falling out of the bath and banging his head; the other re-emerges as a sadistic, smack-addled brute. A perverted cop on one side and a vengeful elder brother on the other - and a bag of kidnappers' cash in the middle - force the girls to band together.

Lynch's Dorothy is the older-acting, calmer, more resourceful of the two. Weisz's Petula is the platinum-blonde bombshell - but, like her investing the traditional ditsy, inadvertent heroine role in The Mummy with a little Lara Croft, she reinvents the gangster's moll as a guileless but at the same time charmingly wily individual.

Weisz and Lynch's real-life relationship seems not that dissimilar to that of their fictional Beautiful Creatures counterparts. In Hollywood terms, Lynch is by no means the nascent 'marquee name' that Weisz is, and nor would she want to be: she has declared herself unambitious and seems very content with life in her Thirties-built semi-detached house, shooting small-scale thrillers (Happy Now) or acting as part of an ensemble (her next-to-be-released movie, From Hell with Johnny Depp). It's not about the profile or a salary. It's about the quality of the work, and finding similarly enthused casts and crews with whom to work.

But even though Weisz may have the more high-profile career, she seems to gain confidence and reassurance from Lynch's earthy, pragmatic wisdom - despite the glamorous whirl that her private life with Mendes and professional life must entail, she declares that she, too, has no desire to set foot on a film set in the near future. It's as if Lynch is the influential, guiding older sister, less metropolitan but more worldly-wise than Weisz.

This is something Lynch herself may have inherited from her older brother, John (star of Cal). Being a bit of a veteran, John, she rhapsodises, is calm and unstressed about the whole acting game. The night Lynch was due to follow John to drama school in London, her father brought him in and said, 'Here, tell her that lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice.'

'It wasn't my dad being cynical!' insists Lynch. Just careful. Like his daughter.

Lynch is similarly in awe at Weisz's spirited glow. This is no self-conscious movie-star aura, but a freshness and spontaneity, a force of nature, that sees her bring a relaxed zest to all her roles. They have mutual respect for one another's acting skills. Each has a differently naturalistic approach to their work. It is this common purpose, one suspects, that has bridged the not-insubstantial gap between their backgrounds. This finds form in that healthy cynicism Lynch mentioned. And in their identical sense of humour: bawdy, self-mocking, earthy, a bit unhinged.

On the set of Beautiful Creatures, they recall, they had been debating whether or not to play their characters as 'naturalistic'. The breakthrough came when director Bill Eagles said, 'Neither of you is naturalistic in real life.'

What did he mean by that?

They stare at each other and burst out laughing.

'A bit sort of...' begins Lynch. 'Well, I don't know. Heightened. I suppose we're both quite heightened. We're not very... What's the word?'

'Normal!' shouts Weisz and the laughter continues.

'Inspiration-wise,' continues Lynch, 'you yearn to meet people that are like-minded. That's the big thing that we're both learning about the business: a lot of the time you're not working with like-minded people, so when you do find them you start to really treasure them - because you think, oh my god, we can inspire each other to do whatever!'

'For me, the whole point of acting is to do collaboration,' says Weisz, 'making something work together. On films or plays, people can just do their own thing: they come out of the make-up chair and go do their thing and they go back to their trailer. For me, that's like being in the desert. A really barren, awful, deathly experience. Whereas we,' she brightens, grinning from ear to ear, 'just went [her hands rush into a clasp] tooph. And just grew something. We grew it together.'

Lynch: 'We really, really want to do this other film together. We wrote it on the beach in Mauritius - we went on holiday there last year, affter Rachel finished Enemy at the Gates. And we got so excited and we just kinda made up a story.'

Weisz: 'It's a bit secret only because we haven't written it down yet.'

Two weeks after we meet, Weisz is going to stay at Lynch's house. She hasn't met Lynch's family yet, but feels like she has. They plan to work on their script and 'have fun'.

Who's your favourite actor?

'Rachel, and Ewan.'

'Susan, and Ewan.'

Weisz acted with Ewan McGregor in television's Scarlet and Black, long before Lynch worked with him on the sexually charged Nora.

Weisz: 'Ewan's head was guillotined. I was a bit mad and I took his head away to a cave and sat it on my lap. And because they hadn't made a prosthetic head, they had to cut a hole in my skirt and he sat with his head between my legs. And the story got out, so all I got was, "What's it like having Ewan McGregor between your legs?" You don't know whether to say something saucepot or go, well, you know it was very cold and I got cramp and so did he. What can you say?'

Lynch: 'Ewan's just like Rachel, a rare find. He has this enormous star status and he's just extraordinary really. He's the kind of person who walks into a room and is just interested in the people there. He realises his power but he's also very proud of where he came from and how he got there. So he uses it in a very productive and positive way. Nora was such a big thing for Natural Nylon [the production company McGregor runs with Jude Law, Jonny Lee Miller, Sadie Frost and Sean Pertwee] because it's a very young company. He really strove for that to happen. He's a risk taker in that way. He'll not really care what the rest of the world thinks. When he's got something in his head he'll just go for it.'

It can be a lonely business, this acting.

Lynch: 'And you've listened to your compact discs over and over again. You have to ration them... I'll play that one later.'

Weisz: 'And you've burnt your ear off with your mobile. It's gone really hot and you know you're getting tumours.'

Lynch: 'What's bad in Wales is that I can't get my messages - that's why it was really awful when Rachel was ringing me from America. That's really being in the wilderness. When you can't get in touch with your touchstones.'

Weisz: 'If I'm feeling lost, I think of Susan, and she makes it all right. Or I say, "Defintootily!" She always says that.'

Lynch: 'Oh! You know what I do sometimes that reminds me of you? I do that [she sticks out her tongue] because you do that when you laugh sometimes.'

Weisz: 'My dad does that when he concentrates, when he's using the screwdriver!'

Lynch: 'That's really funny!'

And they laugh and laugh, and laugh some more. They're best mates, not because they like the same showbiz parties or because it's professionally expedient for one to be seen with the other. No. They love each other's work. They're friends because they understand each other. Because they're both useless at shopping and sorting out things like collecting undelivered packages from the post office. And because each is aware of the limits of 'fame', the downside of acting, and the importance of retaining a real, internal life offset and off-camera.

And that's what Lynch gives Weisz and Weisz gives Lynch: a dose of real life.