Bow Down to Scary Sex Goddess Rachel Weisz: ‘Dead Ringers’ is the Culmination of a Career Skirting the Sensual and the Profane

There are few women in Hollywood who possess the enduring and beguiling sexual charisma of Rachel Weisz. Since 1992 — when a then 21-year-old Weisz seduced a young Ewan McGregor (and eventually built a shrine to his character’s decapitated skull) in BBC’s The Scarlet and the Black — Weisz has known how to skirt the line between the sensual and the profane. Over the years, she’s turned a nerdy librarian into an action franchise sex symbol, spit into Rachel McAdams’s mouth during a lesbian love scene, and captivated the real life Kathryn Hahn during an otherwise staid awards season roundtable conversation.

Rachel Weisz is an actress who is not afraid to turn her beauty and her brains into an intoxicating onscreen cocktail. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the 52-year-old actress’s latest project, Dead Ringers. Weisz plays twins Elliott and Beverly Mantle in the Prime Video series and has never been sexier — or scarier — onscreen before.

Prime Video’s Dead Ringers is a fresh new take on the David Cronenberg classic of the same name. In that 1980s film, Jeremy Irons starred as the Mantle twins, two handsome, brilliant, and co-dependent brothers known for their unique approach to women’s reproductive health. When one twin, Beverly, falls in love with an actress played by Genevieve Bujold, it kicks off a swift, shared descent into addiction and madness for the Mantles, culminating in one of the brothers’ deaths.

The 2023 version of Dead Ringers casts Weisz in the roles previously inhabited by Irons, and in doing so shifts the perspective on women’s health, fertility, and reproduction entirely. It also allows the show to explore the full spectrum of female sexuality. Weisz’s Beverly also falls in love with an actress, cunningly named Genevieve (Britne Oldford) this time, but not after being first mesmerized by her TV crush’s most intimate body part during a gynecological exam. (Twin Elliott has to “swap” in to finish the check up and make the first stab at seduction.) Beverly is a romantic, queer woman who longs to be a mother and in the embrace of her beautiful girlfriend.

Elliott, meanwhile, is an agent of glorious chaos. She loves to order male lovers around like pets and even gets off on encouraging the husbands of her pregnant patients to expose themselves to her when their wives are out of the room. Elliott is equal parts sexy and scary in a way that I haven’t seen in fiction since I read The Epic of Gilgamesh. No one but the crippling beautiful, terrifyingly violent Sumerian goddess Ishtar can compare to Weisz as Elliott Mantle. She is a human praying mantis, waiting to devour not just her lovers, but all of life around her.

This is all to say Dead Ringers is decadent, appointment-viewing for long-time fans of Rachel Weisz. The actress has never been more in command of her talent, beauty, or presence onscreen. She is an artist working at the top of her game and a woman sitting on top of the world as a queen would a throne. You just want to bow down to Rachel Weisz in Dead Ringers and hope she doesn’t — or that maybe she does — hurt you.

All six episodes of Dead Ringers are now streaming on Prime Video.