Rachel McAdams

Rachel McAdams is a Canadian actor born November 17, 1978, in London, Ontario. She grew up in nearby St. Thomas and studied theatre at York University, graduating in 2001. Her early screen work included the Canadian television comedy Slings & Arrows, where she played actress Kate McNab. In 2002, she made her feature-film debut in the Italian-Canadian comedy My Name Is Tanino. McAdams reached a far wider audience in 2004, when she played Regina George, the imperious leader of the Plastics, in Tina Fey’s high-school comedy Mean Girls. Her performance helped make lines such “On Wednesdays we wear pink” iconic. Also in 2004, McAdams starred opposite Ryan Gosling in The Notebook, adapting Nicholas Sparks’s novel. She played Allie Hamilton, a young woman whose relationship with Noah Calhoun survives family opposition, war, separation, and time. The film’s elderly framing story reveals that Allie and Noah are the same couple after her dementia diagnosis. McAdams followed it with studio roles: Clare Cleary, a librarian displaced by time, in The Time Traveler’s Wife; Lisa Reisert, a hotel manager threatened aboard a night flight, in Wes Craven’s Red Eye; and Amy Stone, the eldest daughter in The Family Stone. She appeared in Wedding Crashers. McAdams earned her first Academy Award nomination for supporting actress as Boston Globe reporter Sacha Pfeiffer in Spotlight. Tom McCarthy’s 2015 drama follows the Boston Globe’s Spotlight team as it investigates systemic clerical sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The ensemble won the Screen Actors Guild Award for outstanding performance by a cast, and the film won best picture at the Academy Awards. In Marvel’s Doctor Strange, released in 2016, she portrayed emergency surgeon Christine Palmer, Stephen Strange’s colleague and romantic interest. She returned as Palmer in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, released in 2022. Her later film work includes the 2018 drama Disobedience, in which she played Esti Kuperman, a married woman in London’s Orthodox Jewish community, and the 2020 comedy Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga. In the latter, she played Sigrit Ericksdóttir, the Icelandic singing partner of Will Ferrell’s Lars Erickssong. McAdams portrayed Barbara Simon in Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, the 2023 adaptation of Judy Blume’s novel. On Broadway, she made her debut as Mary Jane in Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, receiving a 2024 Tony Award nomination for best actress in a play for her nuanced performance.