Rosamund Pike

[DB7]

Kevin Maher - The Times

Last updated September 24 2010 12:01AM



The former Bond girl is sick of being called posh, ethereally pretty and neurotic. Pike tells us why she fits no bracket



Rosamund Pike hasn’t slept a wink all night. She’s been wrestling till the wee hours with inner demons and darker desires that have left her emotionally ragged and, well, in a vendetta kind of mood. The 31-year-old former Bond girl and inveterate scene-stealer (watch her swipe an entire movie from the rising-star Carey Mulligan in An Education) has just about had enough of — deep breath — being called “ethereally pretty�, being labelled “posh�, being misunderstood, being involved in an industry that offers limited roles to women and, finally, being known mostly as that neurotic woman who got dumped before the wedding by the director of Atonement, Joe Wright, because she sent out a load of naff invites without his permission.



In short, no one seems to actually “get� Rosamund Pike. “Why are people so f***ing misguided?� she asks. “Is it because I don’t fit a bracket? Is that the problem? I don’t actually fit into anything. Instead, I’m someone who analyses everything and observes people closely, because that’s my job. And when people don’t afford me the same courtesy that pisses me off!�



Naturally, here in the fifth-floor suite of a swanky Bond Street hotel, Pike delivers this rant with a soft Lumley-esque burr that hardly qualifies as incandescent rage. Nor has her appearance been noticeably affected by her lack of sleep (during the insomnia, she notes, she decided that she must write a role for herself that will express “the dark and unpalatable side� of women that is rarely seen on screen). Instead, in leather trousers, lace jacket and with wide smiling eyes, she exudes a coolly luminous beauty that tends to drive female interlocutors towards bitchy “glacial� metaphors, and leave most men dreamily agog. And certainly she is skittish with her femininity today, and will lean forward later and say: “During this interview I’ve taken in so much about you. Everything you’re wearing. The way you’ve sat. Everything to do with you.� Which, though it sounds a bit sexy, is actually mildly terrifying. Or later still, she will stop the conversation and ask: “Do you think we like each other? Do we get on? What would happen if we met in a pub?�



But mostly she conveys the sense of someone who is wholly driven, even if just for this one morning, by the contradictory impulse to prove how little she cares about the way she is perceived, and how much she would like to change those perceptions.



Take, for instance, her new movie, Made in Dagenham. The film is a heart-warming account of the 1968 strike by female workers at the Ford Dagenham plant, which eventually lead to the Equal Pay Act of 1970. The emotional motor of the movie is the relationships between the chief strike negotiator Rita O’Grady (Sally Hawkins) and a bunch of distaff “Cockerney� scamps played by everyone from Jaime Winstone to Andrea Riseborough to Geraldine James (think Calendar Girls on jellied eels). And yet Pike, as Lisa, the Cambridge-educated trophy wife of the plant manager Peter Hopkins (Rupert Graves), carries some of the most resonant scenes in the film. Her doorstep encounter with Rita, in particular, in which she offers the latter unexpected moral support while her eyes fill with tears of ache and sadness, is a knockout. Indeed it’s another role to add to a list that now includes Pride & Prejudice, The Libertine and Fugitive Pieces in which Pike has deftly invested unexpected gravitas into a supposedly supporting character. “But I identify with Lisa,� she explains. “And when she asks Rita: ‘Do you know who I actually am?’, that’s a question to which I feel really connected.�



And yet, the dramatic impact of Lisa’s cut-glass persona (she looks at the pouring rain and sighs: “It’s tipping dine ightside!�) will undoubtedly fuel one of Pike’s perennial bugbears — namely, the idea that she is, well, posh. “Look, I grew up with parents who were both musicians,� she begins, immediately exasperated, and remembering her roots in a small Earls Court flat as the only child of Royal College of Music students Caroline and Julian Pike. “Culturally, I had a privileged upbringing. But in terms of money, we lived hand to mouth. We never knew where the next job was coming from, or whether we’d be able to pay the rent.�



And while we’re busting myths, she adds that she wasn’t just poor, but poor and ugly. As a teenager, a scholarship girl at Badminton boarding school in Bristol, she was a self-described weirdo. “I had a big red face, always blushing, like a charity-shop wino. And I was always the odd one out. Never the pretty one. Totally awkward. Always the one that no boy would want to kiss.�



She explains that the decision to go to Badminton, aged 12, was hers alone, and done for the sake of her parents’ careers. I tell her that she sounds like a suspiciously sophisticated preteen, and she agrees, confessing that her younger years were mostly spent in adult company. And what about her inner child? “Yes, where is my inner child?� she repeats. “It comes out now, when I dance. That’s what Joe Wright used to say to me: ‘You’re the most sophisticated woman I know. Apart from two things — the way you eat and the way you dance.’ And he was right.�



Ah yes, Joe Wright. The director met Pike in 2005 on the set of his breakout movie Pride & Prejudice. Pike had, by then, progressed seamlessly from a ruddy-faced pauper to an Oxford-educated Bond girl in Die Another Day (she says that she became pretty overnight, while doing Romeo & Juliet for the National Youth Theatre). The pair became lovers and were together for four years. They got engaged in 2007, but Wright broke off the engagement in 2008 because, or so it is continually reported, Pike had gone wedding crazy, sending out invites featuring Photoshopped images of the happy couple, and just generally getting very excited about the Big Day.



She gives a gasp of fury at the very mention of it. “I mean, all this stuff about organising flowers and cakes! It’s like, no way!� she says, flushing slightly (she can control the blushing these days, through yoga and deep breathing). “The truth is that I hadn’t even tried on a f***ing wedding dress! When you’re an actress you’ve so many chances to do the fairytale thing. For me it wasn’t about the wedding at all, it was about the marriage. I was really interested in marriage, and what it means, and what one promises. I take that very seriously. To say those things, and to commit to somebody in that way.�



She pauses and sighs: “So losing that trust was massive. Massive.� You mean, because he broke off the engagement? “Yes, because it is, in some ways, about breaking trust.� And would she do it again? “Yes. I really believe in it.�



I tell her that I’ve heard that she has another paramour, but that she’s very secretive about him and describes him as someone who’s with her when she wants him and not when she doesn’t. I ask if this means that he’s a rent boy. She laughs, but says demurely: “I really don’t want to talk about it, or get someone else dragged into this.�



Wright, meanwhile, is currently engaged to the musician Anoushka Shankar (daughter of Ravi), and the subject of their upcoming nuptials, which Pike brings up herself, sends her into paroxysms of naughty giggles. She jokes that she hopes there’s no similar “half-time experiences in store for his new bride to be!� And when I mention a marriage I know where a formerly split couple were happily re-united she announces, archly: “Yes, I’m sure he will have that same revelation sometime soon!� Who? “Him!�



Of course, since Wright’s departure from her life, Pike (whose best friends call her Pikey) has segued into a newer, hotter phase of her career (while Wright, ironically, has only directed the saccharine dirgeThe Soloist). In this year alone, after Made in Dagenham, she’s coming up in the spoof war satire Jackboots on Whitehall, the literary adaptation Barney’s Version and the Hollywood comedy The Big Year. “I’ve reached a point where I’m able to ask for what I want more,� she says. “And to walk away if things aren’t right.� She complains that the business doesn’t often offer roles that “express what women really are, both dark and light�, so she is writing her own screenplays, starting with an animation, the contents of which are, typically, secret.



Otherwise, she says that she’s becoming a sports nut, swimming whenever she can, playing tennis and generally awakening her inner fitness fanatic. As for having children: “It’s funny, just as your career is taking off, it’s also the time that you’re thinking of children. But that doesn’t mean, ‘Poor Rosamund, she wants children and she hasn’t got any. Sob story.’ �



She finishes in a quiet quandary, back to where she began, hoping that she won’t be judged, but defiant nonetheless. “Naturally, I’d rather not be thought of as Bridezilla, but apart from that I care less and less about what people think.� Really? “Yes!� she says, flashing another smile that’s all wide-eyes and insomnia-proof beauty. “I realise that you’re going to be judged anyway. So you might as well just carry on being who you are, and sooner or later the world will catch up with the truth.�

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Rosamund Pike: 'I seek adventure all the time'

Rosamund Pike has been shaking off her taffeta-and-lace typecasting with a run of sharp comic roles lately. She talks to John Patterson about keeping things interesting
o John Patterson
o guardian.co.uk, Thursday 20 January 2011 22.59 GMT

A discernible groundswell has slowly been building under Rosamund Pike's career since this actor, hitherto lumbered with a grave ice-princess image and a profile seemingly custom-sculpted for heritage telly, suddenly flexed her comedic muscles in An Education two years ago. She was the transcendentally vacant, dimwit-goddess girlfriend of one of its shadier characters. Seeing the ostensibly buttoned-down, corseted-up Pike fire off delirious comic fusillades one after another was like watching Monica Vitti suddenly burst into song, or Angela Rippon dancing with Morecambe and Wise: delightful, and totally unexpected. Who knew?

American critics are agreeing that Pike has become the best reason to see any movie she's in: she has crept up on them in a succession of tasty supporting roles since An Education. First it was Made in Dagenham, and now Barney's Version. People have taken notice, actors such as Paul Giamatti want to work with her, and new paths are opening up. That doesn't usually happen to former Bond girls.

"Did you see the Los Angeles Times this morning?" I ask Pike when we meet to discuss Barney's Version, an adaptation of Canadian-Jewish writer Mordecai Richler's last novel, in which she plays the love of Giamatti's life. She's dressed in well-cut slacks and blouse, her hair swinging freely around her face, and it's safe to say she looks rather marvellous today. It was probably safe to say it yesterday, too.

I pull out an interview with Giamatti, in which he's asked how much input he had in casting the women who play his character's three wives. (Pike plays the third, with whom Barney falls in love after meeting her at his wedding to wife number two.) Giamatti told the paper the film-makers had been considering Pike, "and I said, 'What do you mean? Just cast her!' I have a mad crush on her and have been weirdly obsessed with her for 10 years since I saw her in Die Another Day. I've gone to England to see her plays. I don't have this thing where I'm dying to work with a lot of people, but she's one of them."

"That's amazing!" cries Pike with a delighted giggle. "My mother will love that. And I feel much the same way about him. He's just got a great way of talking, he's interested in things and people, like a good actor needs to be …" She reads the headline: Paul Giamatti Swings Both Ways. "That's a pretty good way of putting it."

The way the movie tells it, three decades of Barney Panofsky's life reveal an impulsive, addictive, philandering, boozy egotist, his life prone to chaos, upheaval, betrayal, alcoholic exuberance, and possibly even a murder (he was too drunk to remember the details). So why does Pike's character, the saintly and wise Miriam, dare to take him on?

"It's so rare that you get great lead characters who are not people-pleasers. One question I keep getting asked is: 'What is there to like about Barney?' And I keep thinking: 'Well, what isn't there to like?' Because in a world where everyone's afraid to speak their mind or do anything authentic because they're worried about offending people or not being liked, here's a guy who doesn't give a fuck about not being liked – and he's played by Paul Giamatti! As I say, what's not to like?"

Also in the cast was Dustin Hoffman, playing Barney's wise and mischievous ex-cop father. (Hoffman, in the otherwise unremarkable movie Confidence, at one point grabs Rachel Weisz's breast in a totally unexpected improvisation – an incident Pike hadn't known of: "Oh my God! No! Really?") "We only had one important scene together, and he was so annoying!" she says. "Paul and I were having our wedding day, and we were doing our big kiss, and Dustin would be like, 'C'mon, that's not a kiss.' 'Ooh, now Paul, that's more like it!' 'Ah-ha, now she's kissing you back big-time! Giving you a stiffie, is it?' All this stuff. He's completely un-shy. He'll say things like, 'Rosamund, which part of your body do you like least? – just before you do a take. And if it was anyone else you'd say, 'Oh fuck off,' but it's Dustin Hoffman, and you realise that he's suddenly got you to wear a mournful face when it's supposed to be the happiest day of your life. You sort of marvel at how he got you into this different place. But no, tits weren't involved this time, actually."

It's distinctly possible that she's toying with me. An Education revealed a comic aspect to her talents that Pike said she'd been waiting to unleash for ages: for a long time she was imprisoned in taffeta and lace and posh-lit film and TV adaptations; and then one day she wasn't.

"Well, it's typecasting, isn't it? You play one kind of thing, stay quite serious for a while, and then someone casts you against that and you get a lot out of it. Who knows what makes people laugh? With Helen, I was given so much freedom. To have a character looking on completely perplexed as people talk in French and say very boring, arty things was very fun to play. She behaves as though she's completely entitled, because she knows what her own assets are. She's got looks and she's got tits and plenty of the things that men fall for rather easily. And I think she's aware that these things won't last and she's made her peace with it, she's fine with it, but that's where I think the feeling, the bits of sadness you see in her, come from."

Eight years ago, when she made Die Another Day, Rosamund Pike was touted as "the first Oxbridge Bond girl". To which she says, "Is that actually true? If it is, I suppose I'm quite proud of it." It was her first movie, after doing some television. In retrospect, she discerns in that last Brosnan movie the germ of many of the ideas that came to fuller fruition in Casino Royale: more complicated female roles; a greater emphasis on motivation and character; and proper talent in the cast, from Judi Dench on down. "Unfortunately, it all came together perfectly on Casino Royale, rather than on ours – making the women more active and less decorative. That's [producer] Barbara Broccoli's influence: who says a Bond girl can't have sex appeal and brains? That was her thinking."

And what of the Bond Girl Curse, that career-killing stigma revered in legend and fable? "But everyone sees the movies, that's the main benefit. Sometimes it irks, when people come up in the street and say, 'Oh I'm a huge James Bond fan' – when you obviously want them to be a fan of your work in particular. But the Bond girl curse never happened to me. I was too young to even know what it was. And anyway, wasn't that where Paul Giamatti spotted me? It all comes around in the end."

Barney's Version isn't the first movie to demand an American accent from Pike; she's previously made Fugitive Pieces (from another classic Canadian novel, with the same team behind Barney's Version) and Surrogates with Bruce Willis ("not very good, was it, that one? Although it could have been … "). Still, she felt the need to refresh her American twang, and in doing so earned herself a little lesson in the perils of speaking thus.

"For this one I actually went to Italy with my dialect coach, and the whole time we, or I, spoke in American accents. I hated it, just hated it. I hated being treated while I was in Italy, as if I was an American, because, well, it's not nearly as much fun. In restaurants and hotels, it was really eye-opening, we were treated always as brash, invading Americans, rather than as blunt, sophisticated, English people. Very different treatment."

She was 23 at the time of Die Another Day, without any kind of plan for her career, which accords with other things she says about spontaneity and impulse. Pike's parents were opera performers and spent a lot of time on the road, often bringing their daughter along with them before boarding her at Badminton School aged 11. Pike has memories of being brought on stage by them as a child ("I lay down on the stage and sort of rolled around … "). Presumably her peripatetic life shaped her in certain ways?

"I think when you are an only child, parents are more protective and fearful because they've only got one of you. I was not allowed to do a lot of things that, if I'd been, say, number three, I would have. It means that now I seek adventure all the time. And our lives were quite chaotic, so my adult life is by contrast quite well planned. But freedom is the thing I crave. I find I clash sometimes with people who like to plan things and book you in for lunch. I'd rather someone call me up, say: 'Are you free tonight and d'you wanna go to the roller-disco? Or play pool?'"

During this current sojourn in California, she says she has squeezed in a trip to the state's wild north – "I've been to a thrash-metal gig at the Echo, people doing their big, space-claiming dances and the band pouring beer on the crowd. Not really my sort of thing, but you've got to get out at night, haven't you?" she says, chuckling – and has resolved to become a dangerously proficient ping-pong player.

In the midst of musing on impulse and the urge to wander, she has a small flashback to her appearance in the 2005 movie of Pride and Prejudice: "I remember we camped out for Pride and Prejudice, set up tents in daylight and came back at night after shooting. And one night we came back and there was a burnt-out car that hadn't been there earlier. And it's a frightening thing to see a car like that, completely destroyed, totally blackened down to the metal. We camped anyway, after getting in the tent after a beer, then hearing people return all drunk and swearing and shouting – you think maybe they've come back to burn another car, or to get whoever owned the burnt-out car. And I remember being there absolutely terrified, petrified, with these people whooping in the middle of the night – and then waking up perfectly refreshed the next morning. So apparently my immediate instinct when I perceive extreme danger … is to fall asleep."

As we prepare to wrap up, there's a knock on the door, and Pike rushes to see who it is. She returns almost kittenish with delight. "It's arrived, oh wonderful! My Johnny Depp T-shirt!" she cries. When she returns she's holding before her torso a T-shirt featuring Depp in Cry-Baby, magnificently sneery in 50s bad-boy denim and leather. "I was thinking that with Johnny on my chest, if I got any questions I didn't want to answer I could just point to the T-shirt and go, 'Johnny says no!'"

Ah, so I probably shouldn't ask about her aborted engagement to her Pride and Prejudice director and former partner Joe Wright. The nearest I get is a bat-squeak of foreboding when I ask her if she was alone on her recent travels through California – mainly because I'm rather impressed by women who go road-tripping alone, as Pike has previously done in rural Mississippi. The response, "Er no, I had a … companion," though whispered rapidly and politely, escends on the topic like a portcullis. Fair warning: "Johnny says no!"