RIGHT now Rachel Weisz is in New York where she lives but she’s thinking of Edinburgh. Out of her window she can see the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges. If she turns around and looks north the Empire State Building is in her eye line. But in her head, though, she is currently walking Edinburgh’s High Street.
“If you’re going down the Royal Mile, on the cobbled bit – is it still cobbledy? – there is that sharp bend that goes down on the left and I believe there is still a jacket potato shop there. Do you know it? That’s the best, best place I’ve ever eaten. I dream of those jacket potatoes with tuna mayonnaise.”
There was a time when Weisz, now a film star and married to a film star (Daniel Craig, as if I have to tell you), was a regular in Edinburgh. Rachel then, you might say. Or Rachel before: before she started turning up in British indie movies and Hollywood blockbusters like The Mummy, before she won an Academy Award for The Constant Gardener, before she married James Bond.
As a student she would come up for the festival and catch shows and perform herself. Ask her about those days and she goes into a reverie. “I think of the Assembly Rooms. I think of the Gilded Balloon. I think of seeing some of the greatest stand-up comedy and weird, strange plays from Poland performed in school playgrounds. I was there in 1991-92 and there was a lot of stuff from former Soviet countries.
“I think of drinking … a lot. We used to call it ‘Edinblur …’ Yeah, some of the happiest times of my life.”
She sounds happy even just talking about it. I’m glad. Five minutes ago we were talking about Auschwitz.
Weisz is talking to me because she has a new film to promote. Denial sees her play the American historian Deborah Lipstadt who was sued for libel by the English author David Irving, who now lives near Inverness, after she declared him a Holocaust denier. He is played with an adroit mixture of politeness and poison by Timothy Spall. Weisz’s parents were European refugees who fled to Britain before the Second World War.
The film plays out as a courtroom drama which offers plenty of incidental pleasures. Weisz has fun with the 1990s timeframe for a start: Her vision of Lipstadt is a feisty, take-no-prisoners woman decked out in big hair, shoulder pads and proper New Yoik accent. “Believe it or not, I toned her down a bit because her accent is very strong.”
Ask her to describe the woman she met and now plays and she says: “She’s very funny, kind of fierce. She’s on the front foot, very earthy, very jolly, very intelligent. She’s mischievous. She swears a lot. As they say in America, she has a potty mouth.”

The Herald:
But at heart, Denial, written by the playwright David Hare, couldn’t be more serious. It tackles issues of proof, objective historical truth and the attempted normalising of extreme attitudes (in this case, Irving’s anti-Semitism). It’s a film about the reality of the greatest crime in human history, but, also, slyly, it’s a Trump-era film, one
that is very aware of how we live in a post-truth universe.
“Exactly,” agrees Weisz. “I know David Hare wanted to write it because of Donald Trump, not knowing he was going to be president. He was making a point about Donald Trump’s relationship to truth. I think Hare felt that this case was a very close cousin to Trump, this normalisation of whatever opinion you want to have at that moment. It’s accepted and no one seems to mind if it’s different to the opinion you had yesterday. No one seems to care in America. Well, not the people who voted for him anyway.”
All of which shouldn’t overshadow the fact that this is a film about holocaust denial, a film about an anti-Semitic attempt to downplay the truth of what happened in the concentration camps.
It’s a film, in short, that looks into the heart of darkness. To do so that required Weisz to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau for the first time. She came away from the experience in a state of what might be described as horrified awe.
“It was a production line,” she says. “It was about how can you most effectively do this and how can you get the most money from the product you’re destroying to turn into lamp shades or soap or whatever? And how can you do this most quickly and without arousing the suspicion of the people arriving?
“It was brilliant. The level of thought. As a human I can understand people doing things in fits of rage and frustration,” she continues. “I’m not saying it’s right, but it’s comprehensible. This is incomprehensible. What would have had to happen to your psyche as humans to be part of it?”
That is the question, isn’t it? What also struck her from the visit, though, was how around the camp life went on. People lived their normal lives in the camp’s baleful shadow. “Wow, there were people right here, living their lives next door. And the church bells are ringing and they would have smelt the smoke.”
How do you carry the weight of that knowledge and carry on? It’s a question any of us could ask of ourselves of course.
“Look, how do any of us think about anything and carry on? We just do, right? You turn on the news and you see children in Syria. How do we carry on? We just do. We go and have a nice lunch and a bottle of wine. It’s odd, isn’t it?
But actually we’re pretty good at carrying on.”
Weisz’s back story is one that started in London in 1970. At the age of 14 she turned down a role in a film version of the Biblical story of King David opposite Richard Gere. She went to Cambridge University and set up an experimental theatre company Talking Tongues which brought her to Edinburgh more than a quarter of a century now. Does that young woman she was feel far off now? “I think she went away for a bit and now she’s back.”

The Herald:
Perhaps by that – unless she’s back on a jacket potato and alcohol diet these days – she means the energy of then. She has never been workshy but at the moment her filmography on the Imdb website is chock-a-block with projects either filming or in post-production. And she’s not long finished appearing on the New York stage in a revival of Hare’s play Plenty. All of which seems very full on.
“I get lots of time in between,” she counters. “I’ve been doing a play in New York so I haven’t been travelling. I’ve got a family and a child so I don’t work back to back. It kind of looks like that. But there are lots of breaks in between.
“I don’t like to plan too far ahead. Right now I’m planned ahead until May but that’s quite far for me.”
Look at her CV and while there’s the odd blockbuster in there she does seem to be drawn more to leftfield, often small-scale projects whether that is playing the spurned lover in Terence Davies’ potent adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea or appearing in Wong Kar-Wai’s poorly received American debut My Blueberry Nights. Denial sits somewhere in the middle of the Weisz spectrum.
Ask her to name one of her films that she feels has been overlooked and she goes for a little-known Michael Winterbottom film, I Want You, from the late 1990s, a strange, disturbing tale of sexual obsession. “It was shot by this eastern European director of photography who had worked with [Polish film director Krysztof] Kielowski. It was filmed in Hastings on the south coast but it doesn’t really feel like England.
“And I love that Elvis Costello song.”
Why does she act anyway? It goes back to when as a child she would be in the audience, she says, “being carried away by stories.”
“I just loved it. I guess I just wanted
to be able to do that; create that atmosphere. I love stories. I love escaping into stories and embodying another place or time.”
Is acting a matter of hiding or showing off, Rachel? “Hiding. But hiding in plain sight. It’s not really hiding, but I’m not a jazz hands, musical theatre type.”
She pauses and then adds, “There is a bit of showing off.”


Denial is in cinemas from Friday.