Rachel McAdams

[on acting] I just enjoyed it as soon as I started doing it. It fulfilled something in me, and I’m so lucky that I found it.

I guess I was a floater, but not really. I don’t know. I didn’t get high school.

I want to try a lot of things that I haven’t tried. You know, I did a thriller (Red Eye) after this, because it was so different and it was a genre I hadn’t worked in yet. Then I did a beautiful family ensemble drama. And next? I don’t know. I might go off to do a small independent in New York. I’m not sure. The quality of material is important but, basically, I’m open to anything. I like to stay open to anything.

[on the “The Notebook” script] I’m a sucker for those sweeping love stories. When I read the script, I couldn’t stop crying! I just had such a powerful, instantaneous reaction – it was written so well.

My life comes to a screeching halt when I’m not making movies. I really like to ride my bike around town, garden, cook, and play ultimate frisbee.

It’s always great to make a film about people that don’t get along, because you inevitably wind up getting along so well.

It would be great to see somebody like Kid Rock kissing a man. But I’m sure that he wouldn’t like the prospect of it put to him, and I won’t even go there with Eminem.

My first real kiss came when I was 10, and it was in an acting class. I had to do a scene from a movie where someone gets kissed under a tree, and I did not want to do it! But my acting partner wanted me to feel comfortable, so he bought a picnic basket with all these snacks. He made such an effort – and it was cute.

You would find in a lot of Zep stuff that the riff was the juggernaut that careered through and I worked the lyrics around this.

It’s strange, somebody asked for my autograph the other day. Because I finished school and I’m not really doing anything at the moment, I was just kind of aimlessly wandering around London and these two guys who were about 30 came up and asked for my autograph. I was really quite proud at the time, and they wanted to take photos and stuff. And then they were sort of wandering around and I was kind of wandering around and I bumped into them about three times, and every single time their respect for me kept growing and growing and growing.

To succeed in life, you need three things: a wishbone, a backbone and a funny bone.

For a while I was like, “Oh my God, anyone that would release an album as an actor is the biggest fool ever”, but I happened to have sung all my life before I was an actor. Why are musicians allowed to become actors? No one ever gives them flack for that.

It’s sort of a feeling of power onstage. It’s really the ability to make people smile, or just to turn them one way or another for that duration of time, and for it to have some effect later on. I don’t really think it’s power… it’s the goodness.

It’s a lot harder to do an ensemble because your energy is going in so many different places, and you have to cover everybody. You have to sort of split your attention.

If my fans want to do something for me when that time comes, I say, don’t waste your money on me. Help the homeless. Help the needy… people who don’t have no food… Instead of some big funeral, where they come from here and there and all over. Save it.

I’m not always the first person to run out and see something I’m in. I don’t know; for me, that’s not why I did it. I did it because I wanted to act. I don’t really think about the end result. I don’t feel like I have to see it – for me, it already happened.

Doing one movie every two years is about all I can handle ’cause, being the creator at ’30 Rock’, my year there starts in the middle of June and goes back around until March.

There aren’t any hard women, only soft men.

I quit driving, I’m not retired.

Come on now! How could you be me and want to be someone else?

It’s crazy because, you know, my parents always want me to watch old films to make me realize how amazing some of the older actors are. And I was obsessed as soon as I watched ‘Stand by Me.