Rachel McAdams: she's nobody's next thing—when you're this timelessly gorgeous, limitlessly talented, and crashing into theaters at breakneck speed, you're it

With the 2004 out-of-left-field hits Mean Girls and The Notebook, the relatively unknown Rachel McAdams burst onto the scene, delivering a one-two punch by portraying utterly opposite characters with startling talent, humor, and grace. This year, she delivers on the buzz in the Vince Vaughn/Owen Wilson summer comedy Wedding Crashers as well as in Wes Craven's Red Eye, and with another big film on the horizon (The Family Stone with Diane Keaton and Sarah Jessica Parker), it's a noise that will likely only get louder. And to think--this young woman from a small town outside of London, Canada, would once have been satisfied just being the local ice-skating champion. Here, McAdams tells her Wedding Crashers co-star Owen Wilson about how she went from doing figure eights to running circles around Hollywood.

OWEN WILSON: Now, I want you to know I'm not going to pull any punches here--I'm going to be tough on you and ask all the questions those other journalists have been afraid to.

RACHEL McADAMS: Yeah, I had a feeling. I've been sweating all day.

OW: You better be. I was looking in your little bio, and I hadn't realized that when you were a kid you were a competitive figure skater. It says that you started at age 4.

RM: Yeah. I enjoyed it, and I did it until I went off to university. But then I took theater and just sort of switched gears. Skating was kind of my passion for a while, though.

OW: Do you see any similarities between athletics and acting, like in terms of pressure?

RM: Actually, I didn't deal well with the pressure in skating the way I seem to in acting. When I was skating, the nerves got to me, and I'd get paralyzed, whereas when I'm acting, the nerves propel me into action. That's how I knew I was probably a better actor than a figure skater. My skating coach always said to me, "You'd be a lot better if you were dumb," because you can't let your brain get in the way. And I think it's the same thing with acting--you have to do a lot of thinking before you get there, but once you do, you have to give yourself over to the universe and not think too much. But doing a sport totally helps you--it's great for your work ethic, and I love doing physical work as an actor because I've really become in tune with my body.

OW: While shooting Wedding Crashers, sometimes when I was getting ready I'd read over the scene you were going to do, and I'd think to myself, "Oh, this is kind of a corny line. There's no way she's going to get out of this one." And then you'd find a way to say it where it was not only believable and real but also very winning.

RM: [laughs] You're too kind.

OW: I'm serious! One of the things that makes acting tricky and creates insecurities for actors is that there isn't necessarily a correlation between hard work and how well you do--you can work your hardest, and people can still watch it and go, "I don't buy that." Did you work on your craft, or is it just a natural way you have about you?

RM: I wonder sometimes whether some people do just have it and some don't, but I think it gets better the more you work on it. And a little bit of hard work really does go a long way--it allows you to be freer because you're not as anxious. How do you do it?

OW: I didn't study. Hopefully I make things sound reasonably natural, but in terms of being able to change my voice and do different things, I don't know that that's necessarily me. Like, your character in Mean Girls was a totally different person than the one you played in The Notebook--you did a real accent and stuff.

RM: It helped being in the South for a couple months before we started, because it's one thing to learn a dialect, but it's another to get the rhythm--that really requires immersion, in terms of being versatile or being a chameleon, I guess I get caught up in the details--I really like to concentrate on what a character looks like and try to morph into that. Sometimes it's fun to find an image that's really far from where I am and see how close I can get to it. I love to dye my hair, and I don't mind looking unattractive, which doesn't work so well for film. [laughs] But if you're open to that it gives you more range.

OW: It does seem like the great actors have this kind of absence of vanity, like the way Jack Nicholson looks in About Schmidt [2002] or even in Chinatown [1974], where in a lot of his scenes he plays with his nose bandaged.

RM: I really think that if you're being truthful and have inhabited a character, people will take the ride regardless of what you look like.

OW: It's interesting with comedy, but a lot of times the stuff I find funny is very painful.

RM: I'm so curious about the art of comedy. I should have asked you this before we started Wedding Crashers--not that I was really the funny one anyway--but do you have any tips for me?

OW: Well, pratfalls and things aren't really my sense of humor--to me, comedy is just making stuff sound real. Basically all seven deadly sins are where funny stuff comes from.