A star part for Rosamund’s maternal love
Rosamund PIKE spent months working with Christian Bale on a western, but they hardly exchanged a word off set.
There was no animosity between the two British stars, but as Pike explained, ‘ our two characters are so badly damaged’ it actually helped with the acting process for them to keep their distance.
‘Christian and I barely spoke, and to this day we hardly know each other,’ the actress told me.
‘But I really know Joseph Blocker,’ she added, referring to the cavalry captain Bale plays opposite Pike’s Rosalie Quaid, a woman who has lost her husband and three children during a raid by renegade native Indians in Hostiles.
The film was shot in new mexico and Colorado, and is as magnificent as anything John Ford and Howard Hawks made in the golden age of the western.
Pike and Bale never discussed the matter, but both clearly felt it was better not to know too much about each other. Whatever alchemy was at play, their performances are among the year’s best.
He is almost unrecognisable as an officer with a ‘ war-bag of hatred’ for the Cheyenne chief he’s asked to escort to sacred grounds.
and she, ripping off the English rose straitjacket, plays the widow Quaid as a woman who’s suffered so much she’s just about existing.
Pike said she did extensive research on women who have lost their children, but felt guilty during filming.
‘I sometimes felt very troubled that I could be in that space (playing the character), but then be fortunate enough to go home, and my children be alive. They were on location with me the whole time.’
she did not picture her own children when imagining Rosalie’s losses. Instead, she had images of the two girls ( daughters of the film’s sublime director, scott Cooper) and the baby boy who play the slain children.
‘I keep my own life very much out of it,’ she said firmly. ‘some actors do imagine their own tragedy, but I do not.’
However, Pike acknowledged that her children helped her land the role, albeit inadvertently. she had a conversation with the director via skype.
Usually,
Cooper commented later, when he does this, the actor has got good lighting and has arranged the background, so it looks casual but, in reality, a lot of work has gone into it.
‘and scott said that he skyped with me, and my kids were clambering on me, and running about, and he saw this maternal instinct and that’s what he wanted,’ said Pike. ‘The moment you’re unprofessional is the moment that actually sells it.’
The other clincher was Elizabeth Gaskell.
The film’s producer John lesher asked if she could ride and, quick as a flash, she responded: ‘Have you not seen Wives and daughters, circa 1998?’ — in which she starred.