At heart, Rosamund Pike is an actor’s actor. It’s hard to name just one film when she comes up in conversation. There’s her turn as the ice queen renegade Miranda Frost from Die Another Day, which she took straight after reading English Literature at Oxford University. Then: Pride and Prejudice, An Education, I Care a Lot, Jack Reacher, Saltburn, Gone Girl, and parts as far ranging as Marie Curie to the late war journalist Marie Colvin. I have a deep dislike of saying that actresses are skilled at playing “complex women”, but Pike takes that stereotype and runs with it—often landing at the knife’s edge of her characters’ humanity.
To that end, one of her defining roles is Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, for which she earned an Oscar nomination. As Pike tells me during our conversation, it was a “layered” role, though that is an understatement. She slipped into Dunne’s psychotic mania seamlessly, moving from “Amazing Amy”, the bonafide New York rich girl with a brownstone, to a murderer who staged her death. It was the part of a lifetime, and it tells us something about Pike’s notorious work ethic.
