Rachel Weisz is not a doctor, but she plays two of them on TV. 

Dead Ringers, Prime Video’s spectacularly demented new limited series, reimagines the 1988 David Cronenberg cult movie, with Weisz in the roles originated by Jeremy Irons. Created by Alice Birch, a playwright who has also written shows like Succession and Normal People, the series surpasses even high expectations: It is a batshit crazy, darkly funny deep dive into psychological codependence, mad science, and the surreality of reproduction. 

Weisz plays twin obstetricians Beverly and Elliot Mantle. While Beverly is an earnest figure whose main ambition is to create a birthing center where women feel empowered and respected, Elliot is “a little bit of a wild animal,” as Weisz puts it. She’s voracious for everything: food, sex, Beverly’s attention, not to mention power over creation. (She’s working on creating life outside the womb as well as indefinitely postponing menopause.) The original movie was tinged with gyno-horror; the male Mantles created their own “instruments for operating on mutant women.” The updated version viscerally expands the way television portrays and conceives of women’s bodies—at least partly because, as Weisz tells me by Zoom from her home in Brooklyn, the Mantle sisters “have the same bodies as their patients.”

Dressed in a Paris Review T-shirt and sweatpants, Weisz is jet-lagged after a recent trip to London. Her face is heavily made up; she’s just gotten home from a talk show appearance to promote Dead Ringers. She tells me that she was raised in a family of scientists and engineers (her own father invented medical instruments), which made living inside the Mantles an extraordinary experience: “Performing a C-section whilst having some banter with my twin about what we were going to do later, that was definitely a career high.” 

Vanity Fair: What made you take on this particular project in such an active way? It's your first time producing a TV show, right?

Rachel Weisz: Oh, yeah. My first time acting in one as well. I just loved the 1988 Cronenberg film; I'd never forgotten it. I was thinking about sisters and I thought, "Oh, well, maybe they could be female gynecologists." And obviously that film is so iconic and perfect, it had to be reimagined in a different form. And television seems to be the place for it, where the writer has creative control. 

How did making the twin characters women change the equation? Because it almost feels like a thought experiment.

I totally understand the question, but we never asked ourselves that question. The fact was, I was going to play them. I am a woman, and so it sort of changed everything and nothing. What really changed things was when we decided that they would be obstetricians and they'd be delivering babies, because in the film, they're really fertility doctors, so they get women pregnant and then don't see them again. Once you're having babies being delivered and taking care of women throughout the nine months of pregnancy, that radically changes the story.

One of the things that really stayed with me from the Cronenberg movie was the Mantle brothers’ idea of “instruments for operating on mutant women,” which was chilling for me as a woman. Whereas the Mantle sisters presumably are looking at their patients’ bodies in a completely different way. 

We never really had that conversation: "Oh, now that they're women, we're going to be looking at women's bodies in a different way." I think we just started with these two very different characters. But yes, they have the same bodies as their patients.

Was one of them more fun to play than the other?

Elliot is always having fun, and she has an incredible relationship to pleasure. She just wants something, she gets it, and then she wants something else, and she gets that. She doesn't have any qualms about how much she eats, how much she fucks, how much crazy science she does. She's kind of rangy— her energy is mega. So, yeah, I suppose Elliot is always pretty much having fun… until she's not! But Beverly was fun in a different way. The dinner party scene in episode two with the Sackler-like family, the Parkers—that was fun playing Beverly in a different way because she's so excruciatingly embarrassed, and she's trying to pretend that she doesn't know that they're connected to this opioid [epidemic].

Yes, Elliot's clearly more fun. But I don't choose Elliot over Beverly. I love them both.

That second episode that you just mentioned (featuring the great Jennifer Ehle) is so incredible. It definitely has Succession “Boar on the Floor” energy, and I know that __Dead Ringers __has several writers in common with Succession. 

Alice [Birch] loves writing dinner party scenes—there's a few of them in the show, and they're brilliant. I guess her playwriting roots come to the fore because she can just keep all those characters alive. It was technically challenging to shoot because there were twins, plus 10 people around the table. But it was delightful working with all the actors playing that family who reveal their love of trepanning—they're drilling holes in their heads to get high!—and eating their racehorse. Yeah, it was a crazy few days of shooting in a studio. 

And then of course they have a parlor game that involves a bit of kidnapping. Don't we all do that at parties?

Right? What a game. Elliot takes it really seriously. She's kind of found her people. She thinks they're great because they're so unapologetically truthful about who they are. 

The first episode has some very visceral images of childbirth. Were there concerns about how much to show?

In the pilot script that Alice wrote before the whole series was commissioned that we gave to Amazon, it was very clear: There's a montage sequence, and there will be closeups of birth. So we always knew that. I didn't know exactly how it was going to look, and there was a huge technical crew with prosthetics and makeup and experts on set, obstetricians explaining if I got a movement wrong with pulling a baby out. There was a photographer that Alice was very inspired by called Heji Shin, and she had done some amazing pictures of babies being born. So, I think we always knew we wanted it to be realistic. It was important that the first episode was very realistic so that you believe in the twins' two different dreams—science and birthing. Once the big money comes, then it gets really heightened, so you can go on this journey with them, hopefully.

I feel like viewers are willing to watch all kinds of gory violence on screen, but often get squeamish about childbirth and women’s bodily functions. 

Yeah, we're not used to seeing it, which is why we were interested in it. At this point, there's a whole range of visual grammar for death—there’s comic, there's tragic, there's serious. We've seen blood spilling out of people, and people being murdered. Whereas this is the miracle of life. it's where we all came from. 

You get to perform a c-section in the series without having to go through all those years of medical school. Did you always want to be an actor, or did you have other ideas along the way?

When I was a small child, I wanted to be a scientist. I had a book about Marie Curie, and she did experiments in her shed. So I got a chemistry set, and I used to sit in the shed in the garden and mix things. I just was never very good at maths. I didn't have the right brain for it. But I've always —I think rightly— looked up to scientists. 

I read somewhere that your dad invented medical instruments?

Yeah, he did. Artificial respirators that were pneumatically powered by their own oxygen.  My dad was in the engineering world, and his sisters were really high-powered scientists. One was an endocrinologist who very recently died, and the other was a X-ray crystallographer who died a couple of weeks ago at age 98.

A while back, someone asked if you’d ever want to play a female Bond, and you said “Why not just create your own story?” instead of relying on existing IP. So why did you decide Dead Ringers was worth reinventing?

There was just something about their codependent, twisted, dysfunctional relationship—the genre, the kind of psychosexual thriller, the disquiet. The fact that they're having such a lot of fun in the film, the Mantle brothers with the martini glass and a girl on their arm. They're having so much fun until they're not. It just seemed really like there could be a lot more story to tell. 

The massive battle over women's bodily autonomy adds a new resonance to the story right now.

I think women's bodies have always been politicized, so in some ways it would probably always be very relevant. But yeah, I hear what you're saying about what's happening right this minute.

Had you finished it before the Dobbs decision overturned Roe vs. Wade?

Yes, we'd finished it. So it wasn't in response to that, but the world keeps changing around us.

You have two children, one who’s  a teenager and a much younger child. Do you have rules about letting them watch your work? Will you have a family viewing of Dead Ringers?

No, definitely not!  My son asked to read the scripts. He's actually never seen any of my work.

None?

Nothing. This definitely would not be the one. It’s quite adult. But he asked to read the scripts, which was a really smart thing to do because it's brilliant writing and he's interested in good writing. Yeah, we sort of keep our work separate from [family]. I grew up with a girl whose mom was a novelist, and she never read one of her mom's novels. It was too weird, like going into her mom's imagination. 

I suppose it could feel very intimate to see your parents on the screen. 

Yeah, but there's no prohibition. My son's just not interested.

Might we see more of the Mantles, or are you done with them?

We've left them on the park bench in Prospect Park. I just have no idea what will happen next.  We never imagined beyond that.

Their codependence is such a wild ride. Have you had any relationship that intense in your life?

Nothing on that kind of level. Can you imagine? I think everyone maybe has experienced it a little bit, but because it's drama we turn the volume up to 11. They've never stayed the night in different cities. They've never been apart since the womb. They work together, they live together, they go out together. Elliot procures lovers for Beverly. They just do everything together. It's delightful for drama, their closeness, but not something I'd want to experience in real life!

These twins have incredible psychological depth and complexities and frailties, but I feel Alice's compassion for them in the writing. Even though it's very darkly humorous and can be quite dry and edgy and provocative, I feel in her writing empathy for their humanness and their flawedness, and that's what I think is really great writing: empathy, empathy, empathy. They're characters and a half, aren't they? 

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.