19 Great Performances by Women Playing Love Interests

Rachel Weisz in The Brothers Bloom (2008), screenshot courtesy of Summit Entertainment

7. Rachel Weisz (The Brothers Bloom)

The role: Penelope Stamp is a reclusive heiress whom Adrien Brody and Mark Ruffalo’s con artist brothers, Bloom and Stephen (is that a Ulysses reference I detect?), target for their last job. She and Bloom end up falling in love, ruining everything.

Why she’s great: Like the movie around her, Penelope is teeming with quirks, and in most actress’ hands, she might have succumbed to Wes Anderson-y pretension. But Weisz treads the line between endearing and aggravating with the finesse of a tightrope walker. She doesn’t play Penelope’s pep as childlike naïveté but as a kind of wisdom, the slightly desperate buoyancy of someone trying to compensate for lost time; you never get the sense that she’s making fun of Penelope. At the same time, she’s hilarious, articulating Rian Johnson’s eccentric dialogue with straight-faced conviction – a talent that Weisz exhibited to a very different effect in The Lobster earlier this year.

Standout moment: Bored and inebriated on a train ride to Prague, Penelope chastises Bloom for being a killjoy and not letting her have a “smuggler nickname”. From a plot standpoint, the scene is trifling, but it requires Weisz to utter this line: “I think you’re constipated, in your f***ing soul. I think you might have a really big load of grumpy, petrified poop up your soul’s ass.” And she still seems like the more grown-up person in the room.