Why You Don't Hear About Rachel McAdams Anymore

Rachel McAdams is no ordinary star. She has neither a colossal filmography nor a social media presence to keep her in the headlines. And yet, even without catering to these common formulas of fame, she continues to enjoy relevance across film and fan circles. Courtesy of early career hits like "Mean Girls" and "The Notebook" that cemented her place as a pop-culture icon, followed by critically acclaimed projects like "Spotlight" and "True Detective" that reinforced her versatility, McAdams established herself as an acting force worth looking out for. All the while, she didn't lose sight of the reality that lay off-camera, living many lives as a dedicated mother, a principled woman, and a theater student with dreams bigger than the big screen.

As she navigated the crosshairs of Hollywood — and the good, bad, and ugly that came with it — McAdams always had one foot out the door, ready to leave the moment it felt necessary. It explains the sporadic nature of her film appearances that, though robust, are finite. Even so, her commitment to her acting craft is unquestionable. "It's almost our duty to tell enlightening stories or shine a light on corners of the world that desperately need it," she told The New York Times in April 2024. There are many other facets of her life beyond acting that McAdams has been giving attention to, which is why it may seem like the world has been hearing less about her. Here's what she has been up to. 

If one looks closely at the way Rachel McAdams' career has progressed, it quickly becomes evident that moderation has been key to how she approaches her craft. While her work has been steady since she first started out on television in 2000 — with a minor role in the drama series "The Famous Jett Jackson" — McAdams has not been reluctant to take a pause or even a full break from acting when the occasion called for it. (The occasion usually being her personal life.) 

In what was perhaps her bravest of such hiatuses, McAdams stepped away from the spotlight soon after achieving stardom with back-to-back hits in 2004, the year of "Mean Girls" and "The Notebook." Her explanation was simple. "If you want to tell stories as truthfully as possible, you need a normal, boring existence," she told The Scotsman.

She took many such breathers in subsequent years. After starring in at least one film a year between 2007 and 2018 — with a smattering of television roles wedged in — she pulled another disappearing act and retreated from public view for about two years again. When she resurfaced, things had visibly slowed down on the acting front for McAdams, who linked her mini-breaks to self-empowerment, telling Bustle, "It helped me feel like I was taking back some control. And I think it sort of allowed me to come in from a different doorway."

After a near-consistent track record of releasing at least one film a year, Rachel McAdams disappeared from films for two years after the release of "Game Night" in 2018. It was the same year she welcomed her first child with Jamie Linden, her partner since 2016. "It's the greatest thing that's ever happened to me, hands down," she told The Sunday Times after the birth of her son. "I had 39 years of me, I was sick of me, I was so happy to put the focus on some other person." She went on to detail the chaos motherhood had brought into her life, all the while gushing about the fun she was having. The lines between her personal and professional lives grew even blurrier when she became a mother the second time around.

Soon after giving birth to her daughter in 2020, McAdams dove headfirst into her role as Barbara Simon, the protagonist's mother in "Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret." She found herself balancing her real-life duties as a new mom breastfeeding her infant daughter between shots and playing the part of a free-thinking mother to an angsty teen girl. Luckily for her, she had supportive co-workers on set. "Everyone understood me having to send breast milk down the road in a van all day long," she told Variety. True to her word, McAdams has kept her children's lives under tight wraps, with not even their names known to the public. 

As Rachel McAdams climbed new heights as a screen actor in film and television, the theater student in her took a backseat. Her youthful dreams of conquering the stage were all but gone though. Her time off from Hollywood created the perfect opportunity for her to call forth her latent ambitions and, 25 years after she left it, McAdams returned to the stage in a homecoming that was stellar, to say the least. 

She made her Broadway debut in 2024 as the lead star of "Mary Jane," an acclaimed play by Amy Herzog about the fraught life of a mother raising a sick child in a setting where the odds are stacked against her. Critical reception for the play has been positive and the experience, a profound one for McAdams. "I wanted to explore this world and crack this open for myself," she told The New York Times. "It was just undeniably powerful, and felt necessary." 

The contrast between theater and films was huge and left McAdams raving about the power of the stage medium. Not to mention, it gave her an escape from long hours in the hair and makeup chair, allowing her to show up and stay in her pajamas. "You just get so much time with the material and so much time to mess it up. And then get back on track and then mess it up again," she told Broadway.com, enthusing about the thrill of performing for a live audience. 

One can judge just how serious Rachel McAdams is about the acting breaks she takes by the kind of film roles she is willing to turn down. During the sabbatical she took at the height of her career, McAdams reportedly spurned scripts like "The Devil Wears Prada," "Casino Royale," and "Iron Man" that went on to achieve formidable success. Though it didn't seem like she regretted her Hollywood timeout — spending the self-imposed interval at home in Canada and figuring herself out — she did admit to grappling with feelings of guilt at letting opportunities pass her by. Although she always came around to accept that things worked out the way they should have. 

"There were definitely some anxious moments of wondering if I was just throwing it all away, and why was I doing that?" she mused to Bustle. "It's taken years to understand what I intuitively was doing." Unlike a lot of her industry colleagues, acting doesn't come easy to McAdams. That seems like a hard pill to digest, considering the incredible milestones that mark her career. But McAdams, in talking honestly about her approach toward her craft, revealed that it takes her quite a bit of work to deliver the award-winning performances we see on screen. "It always feels like, 'Oh, I don't know what I'm doing,' and I never feel like I can totally relax doing it," she said on "CBS News Sunday Morning." 

Rachel McAdams has been gracing the big screen just enough to satiate both her fans and herself. A noticeable pattern dominates her filmography, which is dotted sparsely with credits that have sometimes averaged even one a year. Evidently, McAdams has found immense value in pacing herself when it comes to acting roles, prizing quality over quantity. Her limited screen appearances — that have only grown more infrequent in recent years — pack enough fuel to keep her moving forward. As she told The New York Times, even a single performance can keep her fulfilled for months, "if you really throw yourself in." 

This all-in formula has worked well in McAdams' favor so far, allowing her to explore a myriad of genres and characters over the years. While rom-coms constitute a major chunk of her career — and public image as an American sweetheart (despite her Canadian roots) — McAdams has dipped her toes in everything from fantasy to thrillers to even musicals. The year 2015 was an unusually busy and especially creative one for McAdams, who explored her craft on a spectrum that included the feel-good animated drama "The Little Prince" to the Oscar-winning "Spotlight." Post-2015, she has been hitting it out of the park with just one film a year. "I am just grateful people want to watch me — and that I've been able to find some diversification," she told Metro. "I'll keep trying different genres — except horror." 

Given the prudence she exercises when it comes to selecting film roles, one can best believe that Rachel McAdams will be as (or more) selective when it comes to projects outside the realm of cinema. Even with commercial prospects lined up at her door, the actor has been conscientious about the choices she has been making in recent years, saying yes to only those that truly align with her interests. 

One such opportunity she turned down was a 2023 ad for Walmart's Black Friday sale that brought together the cast of "Mean Girls" for a long-awaited reunion. While the film's fandom was abuzz with anticipation over Lindsay Lohan, Lacey Chabert, and Amanda Seyfried returning as the Plastics, the absence of their queen bee was widely bemoaned. "I guess I wasn't that excited about doing a commercial if I'm being totally honest," McAdams explained to Variety. "A movie sounded awesome, but I've never done commercials, and it just didn't feel like my bag." 

McAdams also sat out a new-age remake of the 2004 teen classic that released in 2024 and had some of the original cast members reprising their roles. Turns out, she was actually in talks with creator Tina Fey for the musical comedy but things ultimately didn't fall into place. Despite her absence from recent spinoffs, McAdams is not averse to the idea of a "Mean Girls" sequel, provided "everything presented to her made sense," as a source told People.

Rachel McAdams has been in and out of some really dark corners of Hollywood during her time in showbiz. One such event that happened in 2006 proved to be a precursor to the first time she took a major acting break, leaving the industry for two whole years. McAdams, along with A-listers like Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley, was slated to star on a Vanity Fair cover and was apparently not informed that she would have to pose nude for the shoot. She walked off set and later also fired the publicist who was responsible for this debacle. 

"I have no issues doing it for a part if it makes sense, if it's not gratuitous and I think it's adding to the story," she later told the Los Angeles Times, referencing nudity. "But not as myself on the cover of a magazine about Hollywood's most powerful young women." The cover, which then featured Tom Ford beside Johansson and Knightley, went on to claim status as one of the magazine's more notorious ventures. 

When the #MeToo wave swept Hollywood in 2017, McAdams was among the many celebrities who spoke up about their own disturbing experiences. She recalled for Vanity Fair an incident from her days as a 21-year-old theater student, when screenwriter James Toback allegedly sexually harassed her during an audition. "This has been such a source of shame for me—that I didn't have the wherewithal to get up and leave," McAdams said. (Toback has denied the accusations against him.)

She may have crafted a dazzling legacy for herself as a public figure, but Rachel McAdams is famously private. A major reason the world still knows relatively little about the goings-on in the "Mean Girls" star's personal life is owed to her absence from social media platforms. "I don't even quite know how it works," she once told The Sunday Times, revealing that she was never good at self-promotion. Besides preserving her privacy, her approach also aligns with her motherhood principle of keeping her children as far away as she can from screens and scrutiny. And she has done well, given that only a scarce few pictures of her two kids exist in the public domain. 

McAdams' enduring distance from social media also finds some possible context in her discomfiture over the attention that initially swamped her, when her career turned upward during the early 2000s. "I didn't think I was dealing so well with my life changing so quickly and being so much in the public eye," she said on "CBS News Sunday Morning." "I was struggling with that a little bit, with the exposure." This vulnerability that came with her newfound celebrity proved to be overwhelming for McAdams, who had to take a step back from acting to recenter herself. Such restraint has now become synonymous with McAdams, who has built somewhat of a reputation for being selective when it comes to both films and interviews. 

The kind of critical acclaim she enjoys hardly betrays that Rachel McAdams' filmography is surprisingly limited. She has just over 40 credits as an actor; this short tally has been enough to cement her place as one of the film industry's most bankable stars. Even so, McAdams has not been one to lean into her A-lister status. Right after her popularity boomed in the early aughts, she eschewed the increased attention coming her way. "There was no instruction book available about how to deal with it, and also, truthfully, I never really wanted to be a big movie star," she told The Sunday Times, adding that she would have been content working as a theater artist in her native Canada. 

That is not to say that McAdams wasn't serious about her acting ambitions. The "About Time" star knew the route she wanted to take at a young age, priming her parents about her inclinations in a letter she wrote them around the age of 7. She also kept other options open and revealed on "The Kelly Clarkson Show" that, as a committed ice skater, even briefly considered pursuing the sport professionally. While she ended up becoming a major draw at the box office — earning a successful status as "the new Julia Roberts" — McAdams was seemingly not overcome by film stardom, even choosing to return to her initial theater dreams by turning her attention to Broadway. 

The insecurity of falling out of favor is common among actors, but Rachel McAdams is not burdened by such fears. A faithful believer in the idea that things ultimately work out as they should, she has not been one to stress over her shelf life as an actor in a dynamic industry that has no dearth of talent. "I try not to worry about becoming obsolete or irrelevant because I feel like nothing good comes out of fear," she told The New York Times. This principle seems to have been foundational to the level-headed approach Rachel has taken toward her career as a performer, confident about taking a step back from the limelight every time her inner self needed that pause. 

Clearly, Rachel doesn't play by the rules of showbiz that value acting continuity. Her sister and makeup artist Kayleen McAdams attested to it, telling Bustle that the "True Detective" star is "very confident in what she believes and being able to align with her inner compass." Kayleen added that her famous sister isn't bogged down by external pressures that often drive people toward jobs that don't quite appeal to them.

For years, Rachel McAdams has been coming and going through the gates of Tinseltown as she pleases — an advantage that speaks volumes about her acting caliber — and is assured that if the curtains ever drop on her acting career, she will have a life to go back to.