Pike delivers after acting break
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 formfitting 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, middle-class insurance clerk called Ruth Williams, is married to Seretse Khama (David Oyelowo), who just 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 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’ fraught labour – and another birth that she depicts in the forthcoming war-time 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-andstrain 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 A United 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-and-white 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 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-year-old 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 anti-heroine Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, for which she was nominated for every Best Actress award going.
‘‘Something quite, I suppose, potentially, self-sabotaging?’’ she floats at me. ‘‘For me, having another baby was the most wonderful decision. Other people were like, ‘Why, in this moment where you’ve got the world at your feet, do you go and disappear for a year?’ But Amy took a lot out of me, really. I needed to rethink and take stock and come back.’’
To do justice to the character in the original Gone Girl novel – an apparently perfect wife with a screw loose – Pike had to be unknowable, unhinged, and eventually almost unstoppable. By far her most fearsome assignment to date, it showed us that this Oxford University-educated former Bond girl could cast off the frocks and finishing-school polish of an English rose and get her hands dirty.
‘‘There was a point filming Gone Girl,’’ she adds, ‘‘where I came home and thought, ‘I think I get to be every sort of version of a woman, doing this role’. That range is why people are giving me these great challenges now.’’
Her tone still sounds faintly hesitant, as if she’s waiting to be proved right. ‘‘I don’t know how it seems to the world outside? Maybe it seems like I haven’t capitalised on that success. Or not yet.’’
A United Kingdom and HHhH should go some way to correcting that. And she has another four films in production, all of which are due to be released next year.
But Pike, 37, isn’t immune to the burgeoning anxieties that afflict actresses heading towards 40, especially when she can’t appear in any celebrity magazine without that number popping up. She’s sanguine about this, up to a point.
‘‘When I was about 21, everyone thought I was about 30.’’ She was only a couple of years out of Oxford when she played the turncoat MI6 agent Miranda Frost opposite Pierce Brosnan in Die Another Day. Supporting roles, not leads, kept her going in the years that followed, and a glacial composure remained her forte – there was the eldest sister in Wright’s Pride and Prejudice (2005); an amusingly vacant socialite in An Education (2009); a touching middle-class housewife in Made in Dagenham (2010).
‘‘Now that I’m over 30, people are giving me all these roles for people in their 20s. You become sillier and more youthful as you get older, maybe, because you’re over all your anxieties. That’s why, ‘The 37-year-old actress’ is not brilliant when you’re trying to pass yourself off as 28.’’
As a contrast, she mentions 54-year-old Tom Cruise, with whom she co-starred in 2012’s thriller Jack Reacher. ‘‘With the guy, the trick is you keep getting older, but the women all stay the same age. ‘Would you mind just staying around the same age at all times?!?’
‘‘Recently, I tried really hard to get a male co-star who was 10 years younger than me, because I felt he was right for the part. The resistance to it was so huge. And I thought there was such interesting chemistry – I felt it added a tremendous dimension, because there’s a vulnerability that comes, if you know the man’s younger. But they were not having it,’’ – she enunciates each word of this phrase: Were. Not. Having. It. ‘‘If it was the other way around, no one would think twice ...’’
Because Pike comes from a musical background – her parents are opera singer Julian Pike and classical violinist Caroline Friend – it’s strange to me that she hasn’t tried out her pipes on screen yet.
She has such an interestingly low-level, alto speaking voice, and I have a hunch she can really sing.
‘‘I’d love to!’’ she replies. ‘‘Just sort of add some other strings. We’re losing actors who can do it all. And you know, I would have loved to have been Mary Poppins!’’
She gets very animated, suddenly, thinking of the role in the forthcoming film Mary Poppins Returns that just got away. ‘‘I wrote to Rob Marshall. I just said, ‘I know you’ve probably already cast it, but if you are looking, I would love to be Mary Poppins’.
‘‘He wrote a very sweet letter back, saying: ‘Thank you very much, I would love to work with you, but I’m going to go with someone I’ve already worked with.’ And that’s Emily Blunt.’’ She sighs.
Racking my brains for Julie Andrews-themed consolation, I mention that they haven’t remade The Sound Of Music yet, but they’re bound to, sooner or later. It works. Pike looks so elated at the idea, anyone present would wish they could make it happen. – Telegraph Group
A United Kingdom (M) opens in New Zealand cinemas on December 8.