Rachel McAdams on Her Broadway Debut in Mary Jane: ‘It Just Got Its Hooks in Me’

Let’s get this out of the way: Rachel McAdams is not starring in The Notebook on Broadway.

The fact that the actress is about to make her Broadway debut in the same season as The Notebook—not to mention the recent release of the movie-musical adaptation of Mean Girls—is sheer coincidence.

“I can’t wait to see it,” McAdams told Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek on The Broadway Show. “It’s so exciting to see it take on a whole other life like this. It blows my mind.” She added, “We didn't even know if anyone would see this movie when we were making it. When we were drowning in the rain.” That iconic rain, she explained, was dumped on McAdams and her co-star Ryan Gosling via fire hose. “A really powerful stinging rain. So hopefully it's a little bit gentler.”

It’s perhaps surprising that McAdams hasn’t performed on stage since her stunning arrival in Hollywood two decades ago, with the one-two whiplash of Mean Girls and The Notebook in 2004. (It’s doubly surprising, given McAdams’ early starring role in the Canadian television series Slings and Arrows, a sacred text for Shakespearean thesps everywhere.)

For her part, McAdams says she always knew she would get around to treading the boards some day. “I was intimidated to take it on. There was always something holding me back a little bit. But eventually you need to take the bull by the horns.”

That moment arrived when McAdams read Mary Jane. The play, by this season’s playwright-of-the-moment Amy Herzog, revolves around a single mother living in Jackson Heights, whose two-and-a-half-year-old son, having been born prematurely, lives with multiple serious conditions. “It just got its hooks in me,” McAdams said of the play. “Something in the universe was telling me this is the one.”

The caretaking theme of Mary Jane had a personal resonance for McAdams, whose mother worked as a nurse for 38 years. “I think we all understand healthcare workers a little more after COVID—what it really takes and how heroic they are and how they are not always rewarded for it. This play's a lot about community and caretaking, not just for someone who's sick, but for all people.”

McAdams is also inspired by the fact that, despite the awfulness of her situation, Mary Jane has a wonderful joie de vivre. If it’s easier to dig than to climb, McAdams said, Mary Jane "climbs every day. She's just a real testament to the human spirit.”

In the rehearsal room, McAdams has enjoyed the process of working on the text, and her performance, day in and day out, away from the scrutinizing gaze of the camera. “I love coming to work in my pajamas and staying in them. Film and television you might show up in your pajamas, but you're not going to stay that way."

She added, "I love the finessing. You just get so much time with the material. So much time to mess it up and then get back on track and then mess it up again."

Growing up in a small town in southwestern Ontario, McAdams had a very stable childhood. “I was in the same house basically from birth until I went off to theater school when I was 18." That stability was very grounding, she said. It also left her desperately curious about what was going on in the wider world. “I really wanted to get out there. I wanted to know what all these lives people were living.”

By all appearances, McAdams has been able to satisfy that restless curiosity with an impressively versatile and wide-ranging acting career. For her Academy Award-nominated performance in Spotlight, McAdams studied the Boston Globe journalist Sacha Pfeiffer, observing her mannerisms and interactions with colleagues. For the role of an Orthodox Jewish woman in Disobedience, she tried to go undercover in the Orthodox community in Los Angeles (although, she said, “That didn’t really work out so well.”) Famously, she took ballet and etiquette lessons to prepare for her role in The Notebook whereas, to play Regina George in Mean Girls, she studied Alec Baldwin’s performance in Glengarry Glen Ross.

“I love that I get to cram a lot of lifetimes into this one,” she said. “And maybe I need to talk to my therapist about that because there's some death anxiety there, probably, that I should deal with for my mental health. But I just love getting to drop deeply into other lives. I feel it's created a great deal of compassion and empathy in me, which you can never have enough of.”

Over the course of the conversation, McAdams also shared one of her fondest acting memories: playing a fairy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a moss-covered outdoor amphitheater, with a soundtrack of Enya emanating from a boombox. She was 12 years old.

“We all woke up as these little fairies,” she said. “I was at the bottom of this ravine in this amphitheater and there's big pine trees everywhere. It's never been as magical as that since," she joked. "But really, it was a magical beginning.”

It wasn’t all playing fairies, either: the following summer, McAdams played Clytemnestra in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. “The director didn’t talk down to the kids,” she said. “It was like, you guys can do this. This is not beyond you. There was such a feeling of agency so early on. That was something I loved. Not undermining us just because we were little.”

She added, “It was amazing. It’s why I'm here.”

If those early theater camp experiences sparked a lifelong love of acting, they might also account for the way McAdams is ineluctably drawn to new acting challenges—Broadway included. "That sizzle of playing with an audience, of talking to them... I've been told you can hear everything. You really do feel them so palpably. I'm sort of terrified of that. And also looking forward to it."