Rosamund Pike: “How beautiful, I’m bad”

This article is published in number 9 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 2, 2021

There is something magnetic and irresistible about the way Rosamund Pike she plays bad women. Not that with good characters – Marie Curie in Radioactive, war correspondent Marie Colvin in A Private War – she is not good, indeed, she is intense and credible, but with psychopaths who knows why she is even more so. We had already noticed it in Liar love – Gone Girl, a 2014 success based on the novel of the same name in which the apparently fragile Amy reveals herself to all intents and purposes as a crazy woman.

She confirms it today with the role of Marla in I Care a Lot (on Prime Video from February 19), a comedy with dramatic tones in which she becomes a ruthless health worker with the habit of bypassing poor defenseless old men. If we exclude blond hair and a certain coldness in the eyes, the similarities between the two films, however, end here.

I Care a Lot tells of a problem that has become a sadly topical topic in this pandemic year, namely how we take care of the elderly and how retirement homes are managed. Something that neither she nor the director and screenwriter J Blakeson could have imagined, and which adds a touch of the present to an already interesting film.

How would you define Marla? Is psychopath too harsh a term?
“I don’t think it is. Basically it doesn’t kill anyone. I think she is a woman who wants to win. She was screwed in the past and now she wants to win at all costs. For her it all comes down to the question: How can I fight the system? Where by system we mean a mechanism by which in America the victory of the bad guys is facilitated. That’s why he starts the whole film by saying that he doesn’t think there are good people: given an opportunity, everyone has the potential to behave like criminals. ‘

In fact, for the American system, health care and the welfare of citizens are ultimately a business.
“For someone who grew up in a country with a national health system, when you go to America and see the bills people get for their care it’s scary, frankly scary. These stories are true. I mean, there are obviously safeguards, agencies that take care of people, but the system is perfect for abuse. Marla is a criminal, but she never breaks the law. He pretends to be something he is not, but the law is on his side ».

Once these roles only went to men. Today, also thanks to Gone Girl, even women can be bad.
“I like to play women who are themselves playing a role, pretend to be victims and then have control of everything. Or women who aren’t afraid to say their goal is to get rich. It is rare to see them at the cinema ».

How can you not make these women specks? How does it keep them human?
“I am always puzzled by the idea that you have to like your character. Despite all the self-help talk about having to like and love ourselves, I don’t think one really spends a lifetime thinking, oh, how I love myself today. Likewise for my characters, I don’t waste time thinking about whether I like them or not. But I understand them. And as long as I have within me the reasons why I am acting as I am acting, even if I do not reveal them to the public, okay, it works ».

One thing I really like about her is that she always has a great connection with her co-stars. How does he do it?
“I think my job as an actress is to become the person I’m playing for the other actors who are on stage with me. Not for the public, then, but for my colleagues. If I play a wife, I need the other to see me one hundred percent as his wife. If I play an enemy, I need the other to see me one hundred percent as a woman he wants to destroy. I dedicate myself entirely to them. And I want the other actor to give everything to me. When there is great chemistry, it is because we have both become those two people for each other. For me, acting is not a selfish job ».

Yet to be an artist she must also have a big ego.
“As a child I played the cello, and I always had a terrible fear of the stage. As soon as I started acting and had a character to play, the fear disappeared. This is to say that there is a part of me that wants to hide, get lost in another existence. Amy and Marla are wonderful experiences because they are extreme in a way that I am not. I don’t have that courage, I don’t have that attitude towards life, but being able to interpret them is the exciting part of my job ».

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