Rosamund Pike on Bond, I Care A Lot and why Dwayne Johnson is a true rock.
ROSAMUND PIKE
From Bond girl to Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike likes to confound expectations with diverse roles championing strong women. But as she heads into black comedy with festival favourite I Care A Lot, she tells Total Film that she likes a challenge...
It’s apt, given her most recent cinematic outing playing Marie Curie in Radioactive, that when Rosamund Pike pops up on screen from her home in Prague where she’s currently filming Amazon TV series The Wheel Of Time, she’s conducting science experiments. While Curie studied radium with personal and historical repercussions, Pike is determining whether raisins float/dance in still/fizzy drinks for her children’s homework. “In still water, they sink; but if you put them into Sprite, they dance. A bit like me, really,” she laughs. Dressed in a white, high-neck sweater and wearing no makeup, Pike is disarmingly honest in conversation, approaching an interview with the same openness and vulnerability that she uses in her roles – carefully picking through her feelings to find an answer, questioning herself and TF, unafraid of pauses to find the right words. Even allowing emotion to make her cry when she evokes the particularly bruising headspace of one of her characters.
That willingness to explore has led to an illustriously varied career for the 41-year-old Brit who studied English at Oxford’s Wadham College before landing her first big-screen gig as a Bond girl, Miranda Frost, in Die Another Day. Eager for experimentation, Pike grabbed at prestige costume drama with Pride & Prejudice as well as bombastic action with Doom, tried on dumb (but sweet) blonde in An Education, precision cool with Gone Girl, and comedy with The World’s End. She’s essayed real people in period dramas (A United Kingdom, A Private War, Radioactive), played with daftness in Johnny English 2 and been the dame in Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher. Her role as a vulpine legal guardian who preys on OAPS in upcoming black comedy I Care A Lot is gloriously ruthless, as scalpel-sharp as her perfect bob…
But much as she likes to try on new guises and see where they take her, Pike attacks her work with a Curie-like lab discipline. She prepped for Radioactive by taking chemistry lessons four times a week, and stayed in character as Marie Colvin, convincing real war survivors thatshe was a journalist for A Private War. She even took a dissection class to ready herself to play sci-fi doc Sam Grimm in Doom (more of which later). And she talks about how that intense experience of acting, of taking each role as seriously as the next, affects her forevermore on a molecular level – the shells of her characters sitting on top of one another inside her, like a Russian doll.
If that makes her sound serious, she’s also not, she stresses, and is keen to keep fighting being pigeonholed as an actor, having been referred to as an ‘English Rose’ and offered roles that replicate Perfect Amy. “Since Gone Girl, I’ve been asked to do things that are quite extreme, whether it’s an extreme emotion and women brought to the brink of something, or the femme fatale thing,” she muses. “But I think I have a facility with being very real and ordinary, too.” Here’s Pike at her most real, but not so ordinary...
Looking at your career you’ve got an amazing CV...
And some bad bits, too. Let’s be honest. [Laughs] I mean, you know, you can be complimentary, but you can also admit that you’ve made some mistakes – generally before you realise that there was risk involved. I think when I was younger, I was naive in thinking that I could do things that just seemed fun or amused me or seemed absurd. I didn’t realise that they had an impact and everything adds up to a whole.
I was doing Pride & Prejudice and I got a call while I was in a bonnet in a cornfield, to say that they wanted me to be in Doom, which seemed so ridiculous and funny to me. And I should never have done that film. But I didn’t know that then. I didn’t know that you had to be clever… I feel like I’m very lucky to escape unscathed from some experiences. But to go from Pride & Prejudice to a film with The Rock seemed kind of mad and exciting.
What was Dwayne Johnson like to work with, then?
Dwayne was right at the beginning of everything – knowing where he was going, but I guess none of us knew where he was going. When my film A Private War came out, I didn’t do any social media, but [director] Matthew Heineman said, “Oh my God, The Rock has just tweeted about our movie. He’s written, ‘My good bud, Rosamund Pike – check out this movie!’” And I was like, “My God, that’s so nice, 15 years on or something.” He’s a very good guy.
So something nice did come out of after all…
Doom
Yes, exactly. And also, you know, you have to do things wrong sometimes to know how to do things right, too. I feel that young actors now are so much better than I was. I didn’t know then how to ask for what I needed to do a good performance. Now I know what it takes, and I will ask for the dialect coach that I really sync with, and takes it to another level, or work with a movement coach. And with Marie
Curie, I asked to make sure there was a scientist on hand who can walk you through the exact process of crystallisation. You know how to ask for the things that will elevate it.
To go back to the beginning and Die Another Day – what was that experience like as a first film role?
Barbara [Broccoli] was very protective. I had hours and hours of fencing training and the fencing scene was one scene. I had much less experience of the swordfight I had at the end with Halle [Berry]. So I probably would now have understood the kind-of geometry of the movie, and known that that end fight was more important, so I would have spent more time working on that swordfight. I would be freer now if I were to do that role again. I’ve grown to totally be at ease in front of the camera now. But that takes years. On a film like Bond they’ve got the money, and you’ll often wait 40 minutes for lighting or something. So it’s very hard to keep a flow going. And now I can handle that, because I know what to do. But I think sometimes it’s much easier for someone to start on a smaller film, where you’re flying by the seat of your pants a bit more, and there’s no time to get out of the zone, and have to get back in it.
If you start with a movie like Pride & Prejudice – Joe Wright was brilliant at just keeping the world alive, you know? You couldn’t possibly not be one of the Bennet sisters at all times, because it felt real, and it was our house. If Keira [Knightley, playing Elizabeth Bennet] and I were not shooting, we’d be upstairs in our bedroom, hanging out, like sisters. That’s a very precious atmosphere. I think any time a film can have a location that is one location, it does give it a special energy. Like we did on [A United Kingdom], where we filmed in Ruth [Williams] and Seretse [Khama]’s real house in Botswana.
Is it important to find a director who can create a world for you like Joe Wright did on Pride & Prejudice? Is that something you look for on a project?
It’s quite rare to find that particular thing. Matthew Heineman on A Private War – we had a very, very close collaboration, and we had to go on this long journalistic adventure together, because when we started making that film, there was a lot of hostility towards any film being made about [war correspondent] Marie [Colvin] by her close friends and family. They feared a sort of Hollywoodisation. He and I realised we faced a brick wall, and, little by little, we had to break it down and get access. Because you can’t do a film like that if you’re greeted only with hostility, because you need their allyship. You need people to be on your side. Matt was a total ally of a different type from Joe [Wright]. Less about, you know, conjuring something. We didn’t have to conjure it, because we were shooting in Jordan, and he made it real by employing all these real displaced persons – refugees from the countries that we were aiming to depict. So that was a different type of immersive experience. So yeah, if you do have
I WOULD BE FREER NOW IF I WERE TO DO THAT [BOND] ROLE AGAIN
a director who can support you in that, it’s by far the way I prefer to work.
It sounds like you might be interested in directing yourself. Is that something that is a natural progression for you?
I am interested, actually. But I also deeply admire directors like Edgar Wright, like Joe, like J Blakeson, who are real cinephiles who have immersed themselves in cinema since they were very small, and they live and breathe it, and know the language they’re speaking inside out. I don’t claim to be able to do that. I haven’t got that knowledge. And David Fincher, of course [laughs] – not to forget the master.
What was the experience like of working with Fincher on Gone Girl?
That’s the experience that changed everything. It gave me, probably, more screen time, more time in front of the camera, than I’d had on all my previous projects put together. We shot for 105 days, and I was on most of them. And David spends money on time. That’s what he spends the budget on. He has a pretty small crew. He doesn’t really have any chaff. It’s all about time in front of the camera. And he’s always there, making sure you’re never lost. He’s so in control of the tone of his films. He knows exactly how he’s got the audience in his hand at any time. So he makes sure the actor never loses their way in delivering that tone he needs. He knows exactly how that scene will fit into the final whole.
There are little things I took away, like the way a character always knows where they’re going. You come into a room, and you know where you’re going, even if you make the decision in an instance. There’s not ever really a sort of moment where you’re “acting” in your life. So I’ve carried on doing that ever since, where you know something so well that your brain can think about other things related to the character – just having a sort of myriad of thoughts alive at any one time.
But I never thought I got it at the time. I always felt that I was reaching for a bar that he was setting that was always too high. At the time, I’d come home, and sometimes I’d cry, and I’d think, “I’m never going to be as good as he needs me to be. There’s so much in this role.” There was one day when he wanted Amy to go through 12 shades of something. And I did it. And he said, “Well, you did it, but it took you six seconds. I need you to do it in two.” And I just thought, “I can’t do it. I can’t do it.” I was nearly in tears. Because I had to admit that something was beyond me, and I couldn’t do it. And then just as I sort of admitted failure, this thing in my stomach went, and I said, “Hang on.” I went back, and I did it. But it was only through admitting defeat, or admitting your fallibility.
It sounds like therapy via acting...
It is a bit like therapy, yeah. And it started like that when I was doing the audition, and I was Skyping with him from this gym that I’d joined in Glasgow, because I didn’t have any cellphone reception in the cottage I was living in. We were Skyping and playing around with that scene where Amy is in front of the FBI, talking about how she was spread-eagled and shaved and raped. I was in the full throttle of that scene, and there was this very timid knock on the door of this room I was in. This very nice lady said [adopts perfect Glaswegian accent], “I’m terribly sorry, but we’re closing now.”
And Fincher, over Skype, heard her voice, and said, “Your therapy session is over.”
Hostiles is another film that asked you to dig deep emotionally – and ended up being a beautiful film...
Thanks for saying that – it didn’t quite get the release it should have. It’s a film I’m so proud to have been in. It’s a really beautiful film, and I think it’s some of Christian [Bale’s] best, deepest work. It’s elegiac, and it’s meaningful, and it somehow deals with race and fear of otherness in a very real way. Rosalie was an incredible woman to play. It was really traumatising, because I had to dive very deeply into what it would mean to lose a child, and lose multiple people – I’m going to cry. [Tearing up] You have to dive into that pain, and it’s not a pain you’ve experienced. So, therefore, it matters even more to convey the truth of it. Because to pretend something as huge as that, that has happened to people, to get it wrong would be such an insult, somehow, to sort of not fully imagine it. You have to drum up the truth of that experience, and hold it, to the point your body barely believes it really has happened to you. You have to imagine it to the intensity that you can’t
I ALWAYS FELT THAT I WAS REACHING FOR A BAR THAT WAS TOO HIGH
eat, and your body feels hollowed out. And it’s quite risky, I’ve realised, in retrospect, because somewhere in your cellular level, those experiences are sort of encoded.
The scene where she buries her children is heartbreaking...
It’s harrowing, that scene. We did it pretty much in sequence. And, you know, it’s funny, because I was in a lot of pain during that film. My back went in a way that it’s never gone, and I’m sure it’s connected, you see. I don’t think my back would have gone if I hadn’t been filling my body by choice with all the sort of stress that I was putting it under through the imagining of grief. Sometimes it still tweaks me, and I think, “There’s Rosalie.”
So you carry all your roles with you?
A bit like a Russian doll. It’s not all characters. [Gone Girl’s] Amy not so much as that. It’s the ones where you have a very, very human, lived experienced: Marie Curie, Rosalie, A Private War. You know, Amy Dunne is different. It’s so “other” from you. It’s the same with I Care A Lot, which is so liberating because I have nothing in common with that woman at all, so it was fun to play.
Marla in I Care A Lot is a piece of work, but she’s also a feminist. She’s fighting her way through a man’s world. It seems like a lot of women you play are like that. Is that an active choice?
I think they do come to me. I like women who confound people’s expectations, or women that people might underestimate, and then I can debunk that idea. Even a character like Jane Bennet, who people think is so sweet, I just think she’s quite smart, and she’s found that there’s a more peaceful way to go through life if you think the best of people, rather than the worst, like her sister. And Amy has become a sort of meme now… since that film, girls have almost had the freedom not to be the cool girl that people have unwittingly played.
Do you think that Amy, the character, paved the way for you to be able to play Marla? That audiences want to be able to see that type of unapologetic woman onscreen?
I think they do, yeah. Marla is probably more scrappy than Amy. But it certainly is fun. I mean, my God, is it fun to see… The interesting thing is that Marie Curie is kind of like that, and yet she’s a heroine who we have deemed as one of the great women of the 20th century, so people are much less easy in seeing her be difficult.
We can’t have her be awkward or difficult or demanding. She’s Marie Curie! But sure, if she wasn’t any of those things, she never would have been Marie Curie, you know? She wouldn’t have got there. So that was interesting, that a fictional person is much easier to push the envelope with, I think.
Radioactive isn’t a conventional biopic, it contextualises Curie in terms of the effects of her work – that her discovery of radium ultimately would lead to Hiroshima and atomic bombs. Was that important to you?
Yeah, because I find that the biopic [format] is generally not great for film, because it’s not drama. You go to something scripted like I Care A Lot, which J has written as a movie, and it has the structure of drama. It’s dramatic. It’s got plot. Most lives don’t have a plot like that. This has bold, structural rule-breaking things. I kept seeing the film in my mind as a biography more of radioactivity than of Marie Curie. And I felt easier with it like that, for thinking about it like that. I liked [Curie’s] irreverence and her rudeness and her abruptness.
And I find women like that charming, actually. But not everyone does, and I don’t ask them to, you know? This French journalist said to me, “I don’t understand.” He said, “Why, after all her success, was she still such a bitch?” And I said, “That just says so much more about you than about Marie Curie, so I don’t know what to say.”
Speaking of women who have to be unapologetic about what they want, is that something that you’ve had do as you’ve gone on in your career? Especially when pay parity is an issue in Hollywood?
I’m not someone who’s motivated by money. Hmmm. [pauses] You know, I’ve always thought: if I can make a living doing what I love, I don’t need more. But in recent months, I have fought for female colleagues to be well-paid on jobs. Like on The Wheel Of Time, I fought for another actress to be paid what she was worth, rather than be undercut. Was Ben Affleck paid more than me on Gone Girl? I’m sure he was.
Somebody said something on A Private War: “Don’t worry, I don’t think [Pike’s costar] Jamie Dornan will be paid more than you.” And I remember thinking, “Oh, well, I wouldn’t have imagined he would be, because my role is larger.” But clearly, that would be the norm. Good on Jamie for being willing to support me when lots of
men of his standing wouldn’t do that, because that’s always been the thing. You know, it’s easy to get guys to support Christian Bale, but it’s not so easy to get guys to support a lead female.
Which is frustrating...
Yeah. I heard recently about an actress who reached out to another actress who was in a very high-profile film with her. And one actress reached out to the ostensibly more famous actress, and said, “Would you agree to tell me what you’re being paid?” And this actress said, “Thank God you’ve asked me and I’m so happy to tell you, and you’ve got to fight to be paid just the same.” So that’s interesting. People obviously do want to support each other.
Let’s talk about equal pay on film. You did Made In Dagenham and An Education around the same time. They were very different characters in similar time periods – was that fun?
Very much so. Helen in An Education was a very special character. I had a great empathy for her. She knows she’s trading on being arm candy. She knows it’s not going to last. There’s something like a butterfly about that that’s very poignant. She’s so different from the women that I’ve been playing, and that I’ve been speaking of now – but I would play a character like Helen again.
She’s comedic and you’ve explored comedy with The World’s End and your series with Chris O’Dowd, State Of The Union. Do you subscribe to the adage that comedy is harder than drama?
The only time anything is hard is when the writing’s not good enough. When you’re really struggling, “Oh, God, trying to make this sound good is hard.” State Of The Union is different muscles because we filmed it in two weeks. You know, a great, long scene in a film – we had to do one of those every day, a wonderful, long dialogue scene. I’d been wanting to do something with Nick Hornby since An Education and his writing is so good. You can’t get it wrong. The hardest thing for me was not to laugh.
Was that true of The World’s End as well?
It’s funny because [director] Edgar [Wright] sent a message in this group chat to us all the other night… [costars] Paddy [Considine], Eddie [Marsan], Simon [Pegg], Nick [Frost], Martin [Freeman] and me.
It made me feel really nostalgic. So I watched the first 40 minutes of the film, because I hadn’t seen it since… and it’s so good! I was quite surprised by myself in it. I felt like I was seeing somebody I didn’t really know. I didn’t watch the whole film, though!
Can you watch your own performances?
I could this time. But I mean, who sits and watches their own films? You don’t. You see them quite painfully at the premiere, usually seeing all the holes, or things you don’t like. And then you hold on to the experience of making it. So it was only because I was feeling nostalgic – oh, and that’s one [film] where we all got paid the same.
So what are you looking for next?
More comedy, for sure. I Care A Lot sort of bridges that. But I’d like to do something else like State Of The Union that feels very real and modern. I would like to do something that’s funny and makes some use of who I am, rather than always trying to disappear totally…
RADIOACTIVE IS OUT NOW ON PRIME VIDEO AND DVD/BD. I CARE A LOT IS IN CINEMAS FROM 19 FEBRUARY.
I MEAN, WHO SITS AND WATCHES THEIR OWN FILMS?