SHOWBIZ: RACHEL’S NIGHTMARE
In horror drama Dream House, English actress Rachel Weisz stars alongside Daniel Craig to play wife and husband respectively whose dream of a perfect home goes up in smoke after discovering its horrific evil past.
Below, Weisz discusses her new role.
Tell us about your character.
I play Libby. I’m married to Will (Daniel Craig). We have two beautiful little girls. When the movie begins we’ve just recently moved to the suburbs — into our dream house. I am an artist and I spend most of my time painting the walls and doing home improvements.
What’s Will’s life like at the start of the film?
Will has been a publisher at a very high-end Manhattan publishing company. He’s basically a workaholic and that’s how he has become so successful. He’s worked incredibly hard, but decided to quit his job and spend more time with his family and fulfil his dream of writing a novel.
Tell us a little about where you moved to.
We moved to a suburb outside Manhattan and in the kind of place that in England we’d call the commuter belt. I don’t know if you say that in America but you know it’s that kind of 40-minute train ride from Manhattan. Before the move, we lived in a little apartment in New York but we sold it and bought a proper family house in the suburbs.
Your dream house?
Our dream house, yes.
How does the family feel about the house when they first moved in?
It’s a beautiful house and there’s a garden. We’re really excited and happy and the kids are happy to have a garden. It’s a dream house until it’s not.
What gives them the impression that the house isn’t what it seems to be?
The realtors never told us that there had been murders in the house before we bought it. Then there are footprints outside the house, like someone’s been watching us. It just gets very paranoid and tense. It feels like the house might be haunted or something. The neighbours are all acting very, very weirdly and also being unfriendly.
Tell us a little bit about some of the twists.
Almost at the beginning of the movie, you’ll find out that the person who had committed these murders was called Peter Ward and Will, my husband (Daniel Craig) is looking for him. It turns out that he is Peter Ward.
Any more interesting twists?
Yes, there are a lot more twists and turns that I can’t tell you. There’s a very, very big surprise and a twist that happens but I don’t want to spoil the film.
So Will’s reality crumbles after the discovery? Tell us a little bit about that and how that plays out.
When Will finds out that his name isn’t Will Itentin but Peter Ward, his whole identity is thrown into question. Who he is, who he thought he was and what he thought he was doing are falling apart. It’s a bizarre situation for somebody to be in. So it’s him trying to find out whether he is who he really is — that’s part of the twist.
And how does your reality crumble? How do you feel about it?
Well, I just think that my husband’s losing his mind and that he is becoming troubled. He’s a creative type so he has an overactive drive. I think he’s kind of getting lost in the book that he is writing, so I’m trying to take care of him. I think that he’s just feverish and therefore, very delusional.
As an audience, can I trust what I see with my own eyes when I’m watching Dream House?
I would say that when you’re watching Dream House you can’t really trust anything that you’re seeing until you know the truth about what’s really happening. It sort of unravels slowly … there’s this big twist near the beginning, but then the question is whether that’s reliable, whether that’s true. There’s another twist which I can’t share with you that kind of slowly unravels in different layers of truths and untruths. It’s a puzzle really.