Rico
(COSTA RICA EXTRA) From the small town of St Thomas, Ontario, Hollywood’s latest ‘it’ girl Rachel McAdams, now 36, says she slept with a knife when she stayed in a seedy hotel while travelling solo in Costa Rica.
Currently starring as hard-living cop Ani Bezzerides in the second series of True Detective, the actress went on vacation to Australia and Costa Rica as soon as Mean Girls (2004) was over. In Costa Rica Rachel says she ended up staying in scary accommodation in the rainforest when she discovered her original hotel had burned down.
She tells Britain’s Stylist magazine:
How exactly? I’m pretty spontaneous so I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was kind of stupid. I got off the flight to Costa Rica and got on a little four-seater Cessna plane and was dropped in the middle of the rainforest as the rain was pelting down. I got in a cab with no doors and asked the driver to take me to this hotel, and he told me in broken English it had burned down, so I wound up in a place costing five dollars a night.
What was it like? There was a cold shower and guys pounding on my door all night. I slept with my Swiss Army Knife in my hand, thinking: “I’m going home tomorrow!” Of course, things always seem worse in the night. Dawn broke and I thought I’d keep forging ahead. I took a five-hour taxi ride through the rainforest with the locals as they dropped their kids off at school and the guys went to the fields to work. Then we carried on to a volcanic black beach. A mule pulled my luggage to the beach then I walked for two hours to a cabin with no electricity.
Were you scared? I was terrified and lonely. I’ve actually never talked about this before. You see incredible things and there was no-one to share them with. But I think it gave me a bit of chutzpah and ended up being one of the best things I’ve ever done. It taught me I could survive on very little too.
Would you do it again? I would do it that way all over again, it was life-changing. You get to prove to yourself what you’re made of. In this business it’s allowed me to not become too attached to material things. Now I feel like if [the success] all went away tomorrow, I know I would be OK. I think it’s also allowed me to make choices in my career that are coming from the right place.
