Pike opens up about new role as Ruth Williams
ROSAMUND PIKE met several people who knew her as Ruth Williams, her character in A United Kingdom, when she attended the film premiere in Botswana.
They were fascinating to encounter, but Pike doesn’t know whether it would have been a good or bad thing if she had met them when she first got the role.
She did most of her research at the British Library, to create the earlier years of Ruth Williams, not necessarily the person all Williams’s descendants got to know, but the younger woman who had to learn to get to know Botswana.
“I went to the British Library, which had all the newspapers, and a great sound archive. Ruth wrote some dispatches to the Sunday Dispatch. Because she wasn’t a journalist, you can really hear her own voice,” said Pike in a telephonic interview.
She also read Susan Williams’s book Colour Bar, which she found both fascinating and shocking.
In a particular scene in the film, the Ruth Williams character meets her new sister-in-law and her aunt, who pours cold water on any romantic notions Williams may have had about her new life.
“At that moment she hears what they’re saying, and what they’re saying has a point.
“’Do you know what mother of our tribe means? Do you have an understanding of this? Do you have an understanding of our problems?’ And then when the sister says: ‘Please give him back, we need him more than you do,’ it opens it up to a different perspective. It’s a very telling moment.
“And then later Ruth says to Seretse: ‘We have misjudged this situation, haven’t we?’
“She was fully prepared to fight against the British perspective, but when she is given the African cultural perspective, she realises that maybe she didn’t know what was going on,” Pike explains her thoughts on the particular scene.
She also believes that perhaps Seretse Khama understood more than he let on to Williams about what was going to happen.
She describes visiting the Khama burial ground as a profoundly moving experience and said re-creating the famous picture used for the film poster – of the original couple sitting on a rock – gave her goosebumps.
While she and fellow actor David Oyelowo have known each other for a while, she was happily surprised that they had good onscreen chemistry.
“It’s always a funny equation of you plus the character meeting him plus his character, and in a different movie it might not be the same thing. But I think it’s the strength of those characters.
“We had fun. If I can get to dance in every film I make, it would make me a happy lady,” Pike said about how their characters meet for the first time at a Missionary Society dance in London in 1947 and bond over a love of jazz.
She described going to the Rivoli Ballroom in London to create some of the dance scenes as being like stepping into a time warp, with all the extras in their 1940s clothing who came along simply for the love of dancing. “The atmosphere was electric.” Shooting in Botswana had a different dynamic again because many of the extras didn’t have any film experience, “but when it worked, it was dynamite”.
“There is that shot where I come out of the house with Terry Pheto (Naledi Khama in the film) and the ladies from the village all come into the courtyard of the house and start singing. That wasn’t in the script.
“They were meant to come in and lay down gifts on the grounds but they just burst into song.” A United Kingdom is being released on Friday.