“There are two kinds of people in this world,” says the cool, secure voice of Rosamund Pike, who plays Marla Grayson, in the opening voice of “I Care a Lot,” as the camera slowly pans over the dazed-looking residents of a nursing home . “The people who take and those who are taken.”
The first shot of Marla’s razor-sharp blonde bob shows which category she belongs to. As a ruthlessly amoral and icy self-confident cheater, she perfectly plays the role of a conscientious, court-appointed guardian, while she cleverly separates the older wards she oversees from her families and bank accounts.
Pike, the British actress best known for her Oscar-nominated appearance on Gone Girl, starred in I Care a Lot, written and directed by J. Blakeson, which arrives on Netflix Friday. Pike has already received a Golden Globe nomination for the role in which she is both hideously vicious and seductively fearless, a true antihero who gleefully does very bad things.
“Marla is like a shabby street fighter in designer clothes,” said Pike in a recent video interview from Prague. “It was a deep dive into finding a place where I could have the hunger for money, the hunger for victory, and the belief that your goal is more important than anything else.”
All of them are qualities “women don’t often portray in film,” she added.
Pike, 42, is disarmingly beautiful with flawless peach-cream skin and straight blonde hair. Articulate and thoughtful during the interview, she considered the questions carefully and occasionally went off the slopes: “I wish I could ask you a few questions,” she said at one point.
Early in the limelight as the Bond girl on Die Another Day at age 21, Pike has had a successful acting career for more than two decades, but she has never achieved the mega-fame of some of her peers, or apparently aspired to them.
Perhaps that’s because, while Pike has successfully specialized in playing the English rose (see Jane Bennett in Joe Wright’s “Pride and Prejudice” from 2005), he has never been pigeonholed by prettiness. She faked the British spy film in “Johnny English Reborn,” starred alongside Tom Cruise in the action thriller “Jack Reacher,” and starred an incredibly unsuspecting personality in “An Education,” the die-hard reporter Marie Colvin in “A Private.” “And the enigmatic Amy from” Gone Girl “.
“I think she is bypassed a bit sometimes because she rarely gets conspicuous in her roles,” said Blakeson. “I get confused that she didn’t win the Oscar for ‘Gone Girl’.”
Blakeson added that he had wanted to work with Pike for a long time. “It’s different in every part; You never know what you’re going to get, ”he said. “I Care a Lot, in which you play a character who couldn’t be more dissimilar to you as a person, is a reminder of how good she is.”
Pike grew up in London, the only child of two opera singers who spent a lot of time traveling from job to job. She said she knew she would become an actress from around the age of 4. “You wake up in a creative household and you assimilate that,” she said. “For me, adults were people who could play convincingly and tell stories. I sat in rehearsals for operas for hours and found out why I believed things or why I didn’t. I found some kind of magic in the theater; It felt like a good place that I belonged. “
She didn’t do much about it, she said until she was 16 when she saw a flyer at her school for the National Youth Theater, a British institution that has built a reputation for actors like Daniel Craig, Colin Firth and Helen Mirren to produce. Pike auditioned, was accepted, and spent the next two years performing with the group. After all, he played the heroine in “Romeo and Juliet”.
Her performance as Julia won Pike as an agent (who she is still with), a fact that kept her quiet when she went to Oxford University. “I would secretly go to London to audition for things that most of the time I wouldn’t get and ask myself, ‘Will he give up on me?'” She said. Pike also played at the university – “a hotbed of opportunity for failure,” she said dryly.
After graduation, she traveled for a while and returned in time to audition for the Bond film. “I was really shaggy in a cardigan and old jeans,” she said. “I couldn’t have been less appropriate, but luckily they could see beyond that.” But even though she received praise for her role in the film – her first film role – Pike said she opened few doors.
She returned to stage work and appeared in Terry Johnson’s “Hitchcock Blonde” at the Royal Court, which she described as a career highlight. Since then, however, she has mainly worked in film and has become interested in characters based on real characters, including Ruth Williams, wife of Seretse Khama, the first woman president of Botswana, in A United Kingdom, Marie Colvin in A Private War “and Marie Curie in” Radioaktiv “.
“She could easily have played a beautiful blonde, the object of desire,” said Marjane Satrapi, the director of “Radioactive”. “It would have been easy for her, but instead she took on roles that are more challenging than the others. She is an actress who is not afraid of getting old and who thinks that is interesting. “
Pike said studios rarely saw her as a comedian, but she did show that she can be one on the BBC’s recent State of the Union series, for which she won an Emmy. “Maybe now people will notice,” she said.
“Things are funny because they are true, and someone like Rosamund who plays so truthfully can be very funny,” said David Tennant, who co-starred with Pike in the UK dramedy What We Did on Our Holiday. For the comedy, he added: “You need a light touch, a dexterity, you have to come to work with a little joy – all the qualities that Rosamund has.”
However, it was 2014’s “Gone Girl” that turned out to be Pike’s breakthrough. “It gave me an opportunity to learn more about film acting than ever before,” she said. “I was allowed to show that I am a woman – extreme, dangerous, sweet, indulgent, vulnerable. It was the first time that I could achieve a freedom on the screen that I had previously only felt on the stage. “
The character of Marla Grayson in “I Care a Lot” shares certain traits with Amy – particularly the use of femininity as a weapon and achievement – but Pike was somewhat outraged by the suggestion that the characters be similar.
“I saw her as completely different,” she said. “I would never want to do a sub-gone girl. To me, Marla was more of a shot from the hip, think of your feet person. “
“It was important to us that the audience enjoyed this and that the dark comedic side was rooted in the truth,” she added. “What are the values in America? What do you deserve respect? Money.”
She thought a little and then smiled: “To be able to watch with horror and joy – people like that.”
