To be blunt, Rachel McAdams isn’t really the star you think of when reflecting on Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. While the actress had a prominent role in the blockbuster’s predecessor as romantic interest Dr. Christine Palmer, she was relegated to a much smaller supporting part in the sequel, with series newcomers Elizabeth Olsen and Xochitl Gomez getting much brighter areas of the spotlight. That in mind, it’s a tad surprising that she happens to be the one star from that cast to work on director Sam Raimi’s follow-up movie Send Help – but the behind-the-curtain story is that it just took one scene to convince the filmmaker he needed to work with her again.
Raimi identified this moment while recently speaking with Entertainment Weekly about reuniting with the actress for the 2026 movie. The Marvel sequence in question is from the third act of Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness and plays out when the titular master of the mystic arts is using the Darkhold to take possession of the dead Doctor Strange buried in his home universe. A penalty for using the evil book is that it opens the door for ghosts to attack Strange and Christine, and the director loved how McAdams reacted when he pitched her the scene. Said Raimi,
I had to say things to her like, 'Do you mind [if] there's gonna be a ghost attack sequence, and you're assaulted by these ghosts?' I expected a little chagrin, but she said, 'Okay, what do we do?'... She put so much gusto into it and authenticity that she made the ghost scene work. I had great animators to help, but she made that work as well as her character stuff. I thought, 'I'm gonna work with this person again.'
The sequence in Doctor Strange 2 is extremely Raimiesque, as the audience takes the perspective of the ghost and Rachel McAdams stares straight down the barrel of the camera as she screams and wrestles with the supernatural entity. There’s a brilliant blend of fear and determination on her face as she struggles for her life, and while McAdams doesn’t exactly have a long track record in the horror genre, I can understand why the scene let Raimi know that she could properly tackle the lead role in Send Help.
As I note in my four-star review, McAdams delivers one of the best performances of her career in the new film playing Linda Liddle, an underappreciated middle aged woman who gets the opportunity to turn the tables on her sexist, entitled boss (Dylan O’Brien) when they get stranded on a deserted island after a plane crash. There are not a lot of straight lines that can be drawn between Linda and Christine as characters, but the actress most definitely does excel within the hilarious chaos that Sam Raimi enjoys bringing to the big screen.
Send Help is a giddily gross film that is super fun to watch with a crowd, so you should definitely do yourself a favor and check it out as it arrives in theaters this weekend.
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