Rachel McAdams Showed Off Her Armpit Hair And Asked For Minimal Retouching For A Bustle Photoshoot
Rachel McAdams is out there promoting Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret (she’s Margaret’s hippy-dippy goy mom), and she covers this month’s Bustle. Apparently, 44-year-old Rachel requested that there be minimal retouching for her photoshoot. She also flashed her armpit hair. Rachel says that, after giving birth to two babies, her body is her body, and “that’s so important to reflect that back out to the world.” Wait. Rachel McAdams has kids? See, this is why I like this chick, I know bupkis about her personal life. Revolutionary!
Rachel had her first child with screenwriter Jamie Linden in 2018. She welcomed another baby during the pandemic, five months before filming began on Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, and the role required her to appear onscreen sans bra, and avec leaky post-partum titties:
“I felt like a milking machine,” McAdams says. She’d given birth to her daughter just five months before filming started and was pumping between shots. Then the costume designer threw her a curveball. “Why don’t we just try this without a bra?” McAdams, who plays Margaret’s mother, Barb, recalls her asking. “The great irony is Margaret just can’t wait to get into a bra. But I’m playing a kind of wild child, hippie artist mom [who] doesn’t wear a bra throughout the whole film.” Going braless while breastfeeding is no joke — the leaks, the size changes — but McAdams was drawn to the creative potential. “[We] really wanted Barb to feel like a real person who’s still figuring herself out, to put Margaret and her on similar trajectories.”
Rachel says that some days, she was worried about not wearing a bra:
“I was worried some days. ‘Is this too much? Is this distracting?’” she says.“I hated thinking about that. Why do I even care? But it’s hard not to!” She’d be doing her younger self a disservice if she pretended glamorous, grown-up movie stars never feel self-conscious anymore.
Rachel says one of her last photoshoots for Girls. Girls. Girls. magazine was one of her favorites. That’s the shoot where she posed in a breast pump:
For the Bustle shoot, Rachel requested the images be edited “as minimally as possible.” She says, “With this shoot, I’m wearing latex underwear. But I’ve had two children. This is my body, and I think that’s so important to reflect back out to the world.” The interviewer adds that when Rachel laughs, “her whole face moves” and “smile lines linger.” Translation: no Botox. Revolution Part II!
Rachel says she’s always been firm with her boundaries. Like the time she walked off that 2006 Vanity Fair shoot when Scarlett Johansson and Keira Knightley agreed to pose nude at the last minute with a fully clothed Tom Ford. Rachel wasn’t comfortable. Soon after that, she moved back to Canada, and turned down roles in The Devil Wears Prada, Casino Royale, Mission: Impossible III, Iron Man, and Get Smart to reconnect with her family and live in Toronto:
“There’s certainly things like ‘I wish I’d done that.’” But the success of those projects, she says, makes her think twice about her potential casting. “I step back and go, ‘That was the right person for that.’”
Here are pics from Rachel’s Bustle photoshoot, posted by Bustle and Bustle only. Cuz, guess what? Rachel doesn’t have social media. Revolution Part III!:
And here’s a video of Rachel giving advice to her pre-teen self, including a tip about shaving:
“This is the advice my mother gave me, ‘Once you start, you can never stop.’ I remember rolling my eyes about that and thinking, ‘Ugh, that’s not a fun answer.’ But it’s so true, life is long and shaving is intense. But if you’re gonna go ahead with it anyway, watch the ankle bones and the shin.”
I will watch the new Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret movie, cuz that book was one of my childhood faves. And I’m glad they kept the story in the 1970s. I wanna get a good look at Margaret’s pink sanitary belt, something my Boomer mother tried to explain to me, but I could never really envision. I imagined that shit looking like a medieval chastity belt, complete with a rusty lock and key. Too bad Amy Schumer wasn’t around to educate me…
Pic: Bustle