From Bond girl to Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike on her most memorable roles

Splashing onto the scene like an invisible car tearing through a melting ice palace, Pike made her big-screen debut as Bond girl Miranda Frost in Lee Tamahori’s flashy spy thriller, the 20th entry in the iconic series. Never having been in a movie (or even seen a Bond film), “everything was new to me — everything,” Pike remembers. “There’s so much mythology around the Bond films, there’s so much riding on it, so much attention on it, there’s so many eyes on it — I didn’t really understand any of that.” Luckily, she felt protected by her co-stars: “Pierce [Brosnan] was wonderful to me, [and] it was pretty phenomenal to meet Halle Berry,” she says. “Her stature in the business seemed like she was on another planet, really, from me. It was when she was in her Oscar whirl and she’d just done that amazing performance in Monster’s Ball, and she seemed so glamorous.”

What better way to kick off a career than with 007? “From the very first car ride I took to the audition, in a Jaguar, I thought, ‘This is like a magic carpet into a new life,’” Pike says. “And so it turned out to be.”

“Characters rub off on you,” Pike says, and playing Jane Bennet “was the first time I really felt the balm of what a positive character can do for your soul.” Elizabeth Bennet’s sweetest, oldest sister was “far more me in my element” than Pike’s Bond-girl debut: “I felt free,” she says. “As Jane Bennet, you were allowed to be young. I felt like all my youth had to be hidden when I was playing Miranda Frost, like I had to be sophisticated beyond my years and show no fear. And suddenly here was Jane with all her sweetness and her ability to see the good in everybody.”

The “idyllic summer” she spent in the English countryside shooting Joe Wright’s romantic drama opposite Keira Knightley was charmed by the film’s immortal source material: “I believe that those Jane Austen stories have a magic ingrained in them,” she professes. “They’re about young people falling in love for the first time, experiencing big, searing, powerful emotions, for the first time — it carries you away on a sort of wave of those feelings.”

Former Bennet sisters Pike and Carey Mulligan were rooming together in L.A. when they both auditioned for Lone Scherfig’s ’60s-set coming-of-age drama — Pike to be the glamorous dumb blonde Helen, and Mulligan the English schoolgirl seduced by a con man, which would become her breakout role. “We knew that Carey was doing something pretty extraordinary,” Pike says. “You know it when you’re around it, and that’s very exciting.” Now, Pike looks back on the film as “a chance to kind of walk, a tiny bit, in the shadow of some of those great ‘60s films that I love… that feeling [of] that sort of have dark shadows but they burn brightly. The Helen character — she had to burn brightly, because underneath, there was kind of sorrow, really, and something a bit seedy.”

In Richard J. Lewis’ decades-spanning adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s novel, Pike plays Miriam, the third wife — but only soulmate — of Paul Giamatti’s Barney. “That was [my] first time playing a character over time, young and older, and I found that very rewarding,” she recalls. “I like diving into the different selves of a woman at different times of her life; you have different energies and concerns and priorities and freedoms at different times in your life.” Miriam and Barney’s bond evolves, too, into “a love story that I felt like I could recognize, where there’s a betrayal, but the love really never dies.”

For Pike, Christopher McQuarrie’s action thriller “was a chance to see, to be so thoroughly impressed with, Tom Cruise and all that he is.” The actress was pregnant at the time, and “you always think, as a woman, as an actress, ‘am I going to be fired for being pregnant?’ You do think that, but [Cruise] could not have been more supportive.” It also marked her first film with David Oyelowo, who would become a dear friend and with whom she would collaborate again on 2016’s A United Kingdom. Beyond connecting with her fellow actors, however, “I don’t think my work is very stellar in it,” she admits. “I’ve never felt I’ve done my best work when the character is too professional, in truth. I’m a little odder than people might expect, I suppose, so I’ve never felt quite as comfortable when I’ve been asked to play lawyers, or people in the city… It doesn’t sit quite as well with me as when the character is a bit freer.”

“Edgar [Wright] is one of the best directors I’ve ever worked with,” Pike says without hesitation. “He really gets, almost better than anyone I know, what oddity is in his head, he knows exactly how to render it on a screen. He’s brilliant, he’s totally brilliant.” She looks forward to showing the filmmaker’s sci-fi comedy, about a group of friends going on a pub crawl amid an alien invasion, to her children when they grow up — even if one of them might not even remember having been there. “Funny enough, I’ve got a picture of my son, my baby son, in the front of the stunt car we were using,” she says. “And Edgar goes to me, ‘Oh, that’s funny — I’ve got an idea for a film called Baby Driver.’”

Just as David Fincher’s adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling thriller shockingly twists halfway through, so does the film itself mark a turning point in the arc of its star’s career (and not only because it scored her an Oscar nomination). “If you go by the 10,000th-hour rule, that you become proficient at something after 10,000 hours—well, a lot of those hours were taken up filming Gone Girl,” says Pike of the director’s famous penchant for doing countless takes. Inhabiting the brilliant, ruthless Amy Dunne, in so much screentime, was “chilling… and also kind of exhilarating,” she admits. “It’s the chance to play every part of being a woman. It was the chance to play — and I mean play in the true sense of the word, to play with, to manipulate. She’s playing all the time, Amy. She’s performing,” Pike reflects. “A role like that comes around once in a lifetime.”

For her performance as a grieving mother and wife on the American frontier in Scott Cooper’s revisionist Western, Pike had to go to a visceral place “so raw and terrifying and black and bottomless,” that even a recent mention of the film from an acquaintance unsettled her: “It sort of came back to me like something I’d lived.” The intense film’s starry cast included Christian Bale, Jesse Plemons, Ben Foster, and cusp-of-fame Timothée Chalamet, and “everybody played it for real at every point,” Pike says. “Everybody owned those characters, almost more than any other film that I’ve ever been a part of. All of them.”

“Since Gone Girl, my work has gotten loads more physical,” the actress says, and the proof lies in Matthew Heineman’s harrowing chronicle of the life and brutal work of the late, legendary war journalist Marie Colvin. “I’ve become more interested in stuff where there’s a physical dimension, and [this] was another spoke in that wheel, finding her body language, finding where trauma sits, where it sits on a cellular level,” Pike explains. She felt compelled to take on Colvin’s affecting story because of the legendary journalist’s unfathomable courage. “I don’t know that I could be that brave. But I also can similarly see how something like a war zone could become your new normal,” she says. “Long way from sweet Jane Bennet!”

“I’ve got no interest in making just a biopic,” Pike says. “Might as well read a book.” In Marjane Satrapi’s take on the life of Marie Curie, the actress found a cinematic approach to “explode the boundaries of the form” just as its subject shattered the limits she faced at every turn. Pike loved Curie herself — beyond the incredible fact of her historical significance — because “she was not sweet, she was not containable, she didn’t fit nicely into a box, she was going to be explosive and problematic, I think, and I found that exciting,” she says. “She’s a rebel. And it’s a story that spoke with boldness about a woman who was unruly, I suppose — a bit like the thing she discovered. A bit like radioactivity.”