When the learning curve goes haywire

RACHEL WEISZ NAVIGATES THE UNRAVELING REALITY OF A PROFESSOR WHOSE CRUSH TURNS OBSESSIVE IN VLADIMIR’

- BY EMILY ZEMLER

IT'S BEEN almost six months since Rachel Weisz wrapped filming on "Vladimir," and she's still unsure how to discuss her character on the series. The unnamed protagonist, known in the scripts as "M," was so complexly drawn that Weisz is now struggling to externalize the experience of playing her.

"This is the first time I've spoken about it to anybody," she says, sitting at a table in Goodfare, a restaurant in London's Camden, on a frigid morning in early January. "I may be a little creaky." It's a few days after the holiday break and Weisz, 55, is preparing to start production on a new film, "Séance on a Wet Afternoon." Despite that, she hasn't fully left M behind. As an executive producer on the series, she was involved in the edit, still ongoing at the time of our interview. Today, after a meandering back and forth about the character, she admits, "I suppose I still need to gather my own point of view on her."

"Vladimir," an eight-episode limited series premiering Thursday on Netflix, is based on playwright Julia May Jonas' 2022 novel of the same name. Both the novel and the series center on a literature professor (Weisz) who teaches at a liberal arts college. Her husband (John Slattery) is under investigation for misconduct at the school as she becomes infatuated with a new colleague named Vladimir (Leo Woodall). Jonas wrote the pilot several years ago without a particular actor in mind for the lead character, who narrates the novel as if she were delivering an ongoing monologue. Weisz had read the book - it was recommended to her by a friend -before she was sent the script.

"It was a damn good piece of writing, the novel and the pilot," she says. It led to a meeting with Jonas.