Taron Egerton and Rachel Weisz on the Joys of Psychosexual Thrillers, Playing Dual Characters and His Celebrity Crush on Her
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Four years ago, Taron Egerton revealed on “Watch What Happens Live” that his celebrity crush was Rachel Weisz. But he probably never thought anyone would tell her. When we surprise them both with the clip during this conversation, Egerton turns bright red with embarrassment. Beyond that connection, both actors have stretched to new heights on streaming shows this TV season. Weisz portrays identical twin gynecologists Elliot and Beverly in the Amazon Prime Video drama “Dead Ringers,” based on the 1988 David Cronenberg film starring Jeremy Irons. And Egerton gets jacked as prisoner James Keene, a former college football star arrested on drug charges, in Apple TV+’s “Black Bird.”
TARON EGERTON: I love your show. I thought I’d start by asking about the genesis of it and whether it came from you or the amazing Alice Birch.
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RACHEL WEISZ: She is incredible, Alice Birch, the writer and showrunner. It began with a kind of little daydream. I was a fan of the film, and I was thinking about stories to tell that I could be in. And so I just suddenly one day thought, “Oh, it could be sisters instead of brothers.
EGERTON: What was it about it that you loved so much?
WEISZ: I loved the kind of weird psychosexual thriller element of the movie. Then I guess there’s just the central performance of two codependent siblings having the time of their lives.
EGERTON: Until they’re not.
WEISZ: Exactly. We spent years thinking about the story and cooking it up, and there were just lots of different things that Alice and I and the other writers were interested in. We knew that we had six hours. We knew they were going to be obstetricians as well as gynecologists, and then you have babies being born, and then you get more patients.
For you, in “Black Bird,” also there are twins, which I thought was kind of crazy!
EGERTON: Yes. I hadn’t even thought of that.
WEISZ: Jimmy has a really distinct physicality — the way he walks, the way he carries himself. It looked like emotional armor to me.
EGERTON: I got in the best shape I could — the biggest, most gym-ratty shape I could get into. It’s this attempt to protect himself. He’s just not engaged with his own feelings.
WEISZ: I play twins, but you were also playing two different characters in your show. They’re not twins, but you were playing a character who was playing a character.
EGERTON: The great challenge for him is to get nearer to himself. Because he’s set up at the start as being somebody who is very, very far away from himself and very, very unhappy. Obviously, in our show, the twins were played by different actors.
WEISZ: The most fun thing for me was Beverly pretending to be Elliot or Elliot pretending to be Beverly. That was a delightful, delicious challenge. We start with Elliot. We figured it out after about five days of filming, because Elliot moves around. And Beverly will fit into the gaps that Elliot’s left for her. Psychologically, it made sense. Had you done six episodes before?
EGERTON: No, I did a TV show when I was 22 called “The Smoke.” It was about firefighters.
WEISZ: Did you play a fireman? What do they wear?
EGERTON: It’s kind of a bit of a Paddington Bear outfit. But yes, this thing — “Black Bird” — came along actually during lockdown. I was sent the scripts. The last thing I’d done was playing Elton John in “Rocketman,” and it felt like it had shifted the conversation for me, because it was more of a character piece and I was known for doing the “Kingsman” films, which are a riff on James Bond.
WEISZ: You were incredibly young when you did “The Kingsman.” So confident to be that young.
EGERTON: Yeah, on the edge of being obnoxiously so. But I just knew, with “Black Bird,” I wanted to play a really great, fully realized character on the page and for it to be something as antithetical to Elton as possible. And whereas Elton was all Technicolor and flamboyant and someone who’s constantly off in the ether, this came along, and it was this character who’s rooted and grounded and heavy and dark and tense. It felt like a great pivot. The episodic nature of it just meant that it had that glorious, slow unfurling of a character and an arc that spans more time.
WEISZ: You really got to know him.
EGERTON: Yeah, that’s the joy of the medium. So someone’s just handed Rachel an iPad of me saying that my first-ever crush was Rachel. So here we are, sitting in the awkwardness.
WEISZ: I’m very honored. Thank you. Gosh.
EGERTON: Time must be pressing on now, isn’t it?
WEISZ: We’re grown-ups now. I think mine was Marc Almond.
EGERTON: Marc Almond? You’re not going to let us move past this, are you?
WEISZ: No, moving swiftly on.
Set Design: Lucy Holt; Production: Alexey Galetskiy/AGPNYC
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