“YOU HAVE TO DO THINGS WRONG SOMETIMES TO KNOW HOW TO DO THINGS RIGHT” ROSAMUND PIKE
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 by taking chemistry lessons four times a week, and stayed in character as Marie Colvin, convincing real war survivors thatshe was a journalist for . She even took a dissection class to ready herself to play sci-fi doc (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.
