Why Rachel McAdams Isn’t in the Spotlight 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.