'YOU HAVE TO DO THINGS WRONG SOMETIMES TO KNOW HOW TO DO THINGS RIGHT' - ROSAMUND PIKE

From Bond girl to Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike likes to confound expectations with diverse roles championing strong women. But as she heads into black comedy with festival favourite I Care A Lot, she tells Total Film that she likes a challenge...

- JANE CROWTHER

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