Rachel McAdams on starring in Mary Jane and her favorite Broadway tradition
Rachel McAdams giggles after flubbing a request to say her name into the camera and identify herself as a Tony Award nominee. “I’m not used to saying it yet!” she explains, directing a gleaming smile at playwright Amy Herzog, her boothmate at a Meet the Nominees event at the Sofitel Hotel.
McAdams is currently making her Broadway debut in Herzog’s Mary Jane. She plays the title character: a single mother caring for her chronically ill young son, with support from a variety of other women. (“The play does not dwell in helplessness,” wrote Time Out’s Adam Feldman in his five-star review. “It’s more interested in how people try to help.”)
“I am honored to play this part every day,” says McAdams, who moved with her husband and two young children to New York City for the opportunity. “I’m so happy this beautiful play has been received positively by so many people. It fills me up.”
The subject of the play is a personal one for Herzog, who is a double Tony nominee this year for Mary Jane and her adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People: When she wrote it, she was tending to a daughter who was born with the muscular disease nemaline myopathy. Carrie Coon starred in the play’s 2017 runs at Yale Repertory Theatre and New York Theatre Workshop. In casting the role for Broadway, director Anne Kauffman was looking for a very particular quality. “Mary Jane is an unusual character: She is sunny in a way that’s actually sincere,” Kauffman says. “I don’t think you get that kind of sincerity in people a lot. And Rachel McAdams exudes that.”
“Annie and I were gasping hearing her voice,” Herzog recalls of the first reading with McAdams. “We got to perform together,” McAdams chimes in, grabbing Herzog’s hand. “Oh, that’s right!” Herzog exclaims as they continue to hold hands. “And Amy has incredible comedic timing,” McAdams makes sure to point out.
“It was like a childhood dream that I got to act with her,” Herzog says before choking up a bit—leading McAdams to get emotional too. “There’s so much in her that is Mary Jane.”
Although she played a stage actress in cult TV series Slings & Arrows, it’s been 25 years since the last time McAdams did live theater. Broadway, she says, has been “otherworldly.” She’s been relearning the closeness that comes from being part of a small cast, and part of the Broadway world at large. “I didn’t know about that lovely tradition where every cast signs a little good-luck wish—break a leg—for every other cast on opening night, and then they hang it up backstage before you go on,” she says. “It’s like high school when everybody signs your yearbook. It’s really sweet.”
That sense of community extends to awards season, which feels different from her experience as a 2016 Oscar nominee for Spotlight. “With the Oscars, you don’t really see each other,” she says. “There’s a few luncheons and that sort of thing, but it’s not like this.” She would love to catch up with her fellow Best Actress nominee, Mother Play’s Jessica Lange, who played her mother in the 2012 film The Vow: “I did tell her how much I loved the show, but I’d love to pick her brain!”
Meanwhile, McAdams is just “going with the flow” in navigating her still unfamiliar role as a Tony nominee, and enjoying the company she’s keeping. “Everybody knows each other. Everybody’s so happy for each other,” she says. “It feels like a family.”
Mary Jane is playing at Manhattan Theatre Club’s Samuel J. Friedman Theatre through June 16. You can buy tickets here.
