‘When someone risks it all for love, I can’t help crying’

Rosamund Pike tells Tim Robey why she stopped acting after ‘Gone Girl’ and how a moving true story lured her back

Rosamund Pike has given birth four times lately, but you wouldn’t ever know it. Dressed in a form-fitting red-and-ivory cheongsam, the serenely poised actress – who won an Oscar-nomination for Gone Girl in 2015 – doesn’t look tired in the slightest. Two of these births took place in real life; two were acting assignments.

In Pike’s new film, A United Kingdom, she puts us through an especially traumatic delivery. Her character, a nice, middleclass insurance clerk called Ruth Williams, is married to Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), who just so happens to be the future king of Bechuanaland, the one-time British colony now called Botswana. Because the real-life relationship caused huge controversy in both Britain and Bechuanaland in 1948, Williams and Khama spend much of the film separated, fighting for their legal rights. Khama, ironically, is expelled from his homeland, while Williams stays there in the blistering heat, hoping for her husband’s imminent return, which comes too late for him to witness the birth of their first baby.

Williams’s fraught labour – and another birth which she depicts in the forthcoming wartime drama HHhH – were clearly an empathetic business for Pike. She gave birth to her second child, a boy called Atom, in December 2014, and was determined not to rely on cinema’s usual grunt-and-strain shorthand.

“We wanted to get the other bits of childbirth in,” she says of herself and Amma Asante, the director of A United Kingdom. “We’re talking about that animal thing, when women stop walking like human beings, more like an animal.”

Spirited and one from the heart, her performance in AUnited Kingdom is the first sign that Pike is back in business after taking a year off after the birth of Atom. She knew nothing about the Khamas before the script came to her. In fact, it was a black-andwhite photograph that Oyelowo sent, of the couple sitting on a hilltop high above Bechuanaland’s plains, which instantly convinced her to take the role. She started crying as she looked at this image, and wells up a little even speaking about it now.

“For some reason, these two people, this close-up of their faces, sent tears pouring down. It was very odd and very piercing. It was probably seeing the love, but underneath that, seeing what it had cost them. Any time people are putting themselves out, emotionally, it gets to me. They’ve exposed themselves. Because it really did cost them. They really went through a lot, in order to end up having the most wonderful marriage.”

The real Seretse Khama overcame prejudice to become the first president of Botswana and Williams was his first lady.

Pike’s own route to happiness has itself not been without its problems. Once engaged to the director Joe Wright, she was jilted when he called off their nuptials only a month before the wedding in 2008. Her subsequent decision to start a family with Old Etonian Robie Uniacke, a 53-yearold mathematician and former heroin addict, was also questioned by some.

Pike has described Uniacke as the most interesting person she’s ever met who has “a very astute mind and is very, very well read and articulate”. She also defends her decision to take a year off straight after her breakthrough role as antiheroine Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, for which she was nominated for every Best Actress award going.

“Something quite, I suppose, potentially, self-

‘ really took a lot out of me. I needed to rethink and take stock’