At the height of her career in Hollywood, Rachel McAdams says she stepped away from it all, turning down some major roles in order to “stay sane.”

Speaking to Bustle for the upcoming film Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, her first non-Marvel role since 2020, McAdams lives a largely quiet life in the South with her screenwriter partner Jamie Linden and their two children. “I guess I always had a sense that it would be okay; either it’s going to work out or it’s not,” she said of her career, adding that taking hiatuses from acting “really helped me feel empowered. It helped me feel like I was taking back some control. And I think it sort of allowed me to come in from a different doorway.”

In the mid-2000s, on the heels of her roles in The Notebook and Mean Girls, McAdams recalled turning down projects including The Devil Wears Prada, Casino Royale, Mission: Impossible III, Iron Man, and Get Smart. (Anne Hathaway presumably offers her gratitude.) “There’s certainly things like, ‘I wish I’d done that,’” she told Bustle, adding that, even so, “I step back and go, ‘That was the right person for that.’”

During McAdams’s two-year break living in Canada, she said, the actor “felt guilty for not capitalizing on the opportunity that I was being given, because I knew I was in such a lucky spot. But I also knew it wasn’t quite jiving with my personality and what I needed to stay sane.” It would take time for McAdams to truly understand her own choices. “There were definitely some anxious moments of wondering if I was just throwing it all away, and why was I doing that? It’s taken years to understand what I intuitively was doing,” she said.

As for whether or not McAdams will dip into the past by appearing in the upcoming Mean Girls movie musical, negotiations for original cast members Lindsay Lohan, Amanda Seyfried, and Lacey Chabert, in addition to McAdams, to make a cameo have reportedly occurred. But the OG Regina George expressed skepticism about going back to school. “I don’t see a way to shoehorn us in,” she told the outlet. But “if Tina [Fey] can figure it out, I’m there, for sure.”