Rosamund Pike and I are sitting in a dark wood-clad room in the Jacobean Boston Manor House in Brentford. It was once, a small sign informs us, ‘James Clitherow III’s strongroom’, built by the then-owner to safely store documents.
‘A strongroom,’ Pike says slowly, reading the caption aloud in her distinctive low, luxurious register. ‘That’s pretty cool.’ This seems a very Rosamund Pike thing to pick up on. A magpie for detail, she channels her astute observational skills into nuanced performances on screen and stage, from Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne and scheming con-woman Marla in I Care A Lot, to Marie Colvin (A Private War) and Marie Curie (Radioactive). Formidably intelligent with imperious good looks, from a distance she could read as intimidating, but in person Pike sparkles with warmth, humour and genuine interest in those around her.
One of her new year’s resolutions, she tells me (apart from cutting down on the ‘bizarre quantities’ of dark chocolate she consumes), is to take herself less seriously. Does she have a propensity to do that? ‘Errr, I am thoughtful. I think about things. But I can also take the piss [out of myself ], which was fun to do on the shoot today,’ she says, referencing the Grazia photo shoot, which has just wrapped, her lavish Dior looks swapped for black pants and biker boots, make-up removed ahead of a flight this evening. ‘There are moments when you’re being focused and you look around this room of 10 brilliantly creative people – and the focal point is you, in a big dress – and you sort of think, this is mad!’
A grand house like this, with nooks and crannies, is familiar turf for Pike, who currently stars in Emerald Fennell’s latest directorial outing, Saltburn. Should you find yourself entering the holiday season’s close-proximity family time with trepidation, consider it essential viewing. The film is a grotesque, thrilling illustration of Tolstoy’s assertion that ‘each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’. Rough precis: working-class loner Oliver (Barry Keoghan) is taken under the wing of dazzling, aristocratic heart-throb Felix (Jacob Elordi) at Oxford University in the mid-noughties, Felix invites him to spend the summer at his sprawling estate, the titular Saltburn. No spoilers, but... twists ensue.
Pike plays Elspeth Catton, mother of Felix and bestower of the film’s best one-liners. It’s a wickedly funny turn, but movingly brittle too. ‘Elspeth is a gift of a character to play because she is so self-obsessed and funny because of that and vain and has a view of herself that really only she holds. And she’s also kind of fabulous as well,’ says Pike. It was, she says, enormous fun to film and she pounced at the opportunity to work with the ‘so smart and funny’ Fennell.
Saltburn’s provocative exploration of class, social striving and privilege has made it a ripe subject for think-pieces and post- viewing dissection. The upper classes are ‘amazing to play because they are often emotionally stunted because of having been at boarding schools and having massive privilege and a strange lack of care at the same time’, she says.
The daughter of opera singers and an Oxford graduate, Pike might seem to be a member of the upper crust intelligentsia but says she has always gravitated to stories about outsiders – and has felt out of place herself.
Take this by way of illustration. Pike remembers being in a poetry class at university and suddenly feeling this ‘boiling anger’ rearing. ‘Everyone talking about the structure of this poem [and] I thought why is nobody talking about what this poem makes them feel? I was suddenly feeling loads and I thought, fuck it, I’m just going to say it and if they all think I’m unsophisticated then sod it! I don’t care!’ She admits it was less about the poem and more about how ‘analysis trumps meaning, the analysis of how it’s done trumps why it’s done and what things make you feel’.
Does she feel that she has a surplus of emotions, I ask? ‘I think that’s a lovely way to live and I encourage my children; emotions are part of life, of course they can be difficult and complicated but they also make life wonderful.’
Pike’s own family life is a happier affair than the Cattons’. For the past four years she has been granted the ‘privilege’ of calling Prague home for herself, partner Robie Uniacke and her two children, Solo and Atom, having headed out there to film Amazon Studios’ mega-bucks fantasy series The Wheel Of Time. In the Czech capital she has found ‘a lovely place to live and raise children. Just to be in a Central European city, and feel part of Europe when we’re retreating, has been really nice.’ She has made advent calendars for the kids and says the set design from the Grazia shoot has influenced her festive tablescaping plans – ‘[it] makes me want to go to Alfies Antique Market and buy odd china and tie ribbons around my candles and use a tablecloth’.
EMOTIONS CAN BE DIFFICULT AND COMPLICATED – BUT THEY MAKE LIFE WONDERFUL
Not that you should expect to see any of that on Instagram. Despite her profile, Pike remains something of an enigma. There is definitely a pressure to use social media, she says, but during the recent actors’ strike she didn’t open it once. She enjoys posting for_The Wheel Of Time_’s ‘passionate fan base’ and wants to do it ‘properly, I want to give them stuff that they might enjoy looking at’, but aside from that, she is one of the only people I have ever met who doesn’t baulk at my 66,000 unread emails. ‘I don’t think our brains were built for modern life,’ she laughs.
Pike is 44. What advice would she have for anyone heading toward 40, so often treated as a use-by date for women? ‘Forty is fine, honestly. It’s really fine,’ she says reassuringly, adding that she threw a ‘really good party, which I recommend’. Is she fun to go out with? ‘Well I commit, when I commit!'
Pike’s most interesting roles have come – by Hollywood standards – late (she was 35 when she landed Gone Girl, the role that ‘changed everything’). Is it that the industry script is changing or has she deliberately sought out interesting parts? ‘I think some actresses don’t want to play the mother. They don’t feel ready,’ she says. But playing the mother of a teenager doesn’t scare her. ‘Realising you’re not the daughter any more, I don’t have a fear of that, but I think it could hold people back.’
Great call; there has already been awards buzz around her Saltburn performance. Although Pike isn’t motivated by statuettes, she says, ‘it would be amazingly exciting of course. It is exciting,’ but admits to being mystified by the political lingo around awards season. ‘“We don’t know if so-and- sowillbecampaigning,”’shelaughs.She would love, she says, to be nominated for the SAG ensemble cast award more than anything (‘your performance doesn’t stand alone. Ever’).
Still, rejection is a familiar territory for actors, even those as accomplished as Pike. Given the competitive nature of the biz, I ask her how she manages to use apparent failures and to avoid professional envy. ‘I think, in retrospect, rejection has made me stronger, for sure. It really has. It’s made me more humble. I used to have more of a problem of feeling like I didn’t deserve any success that I had and now I am happy to be grateful for it because I’ve also had the flip side,’ she says, adding of her peers, ‘everyone has diverged, doing different things, made their mark in different ways. And there is space for all of you. You just have to keep the faith and look for the thing you have a secret about and that will be yours, that will be the one that comes for you.’
Perhaps the secret that Pike has unlocked is how we are all, to some extent, acting. It’s one of the reasons why the Amy Dunne ‘cool girl’ speech resonated with so many women, or why if Elspeth ‘thinks if she dipped her toe into the water of real feeling she’ll be sucked down a plughole she’ll never return from’.
‘Construction of self. That’s something I’m very interested in,’ she smiles. ‘You see this is what happens in interviews. You get on to the real stuff !’ You get the impression she just can’t help it, but now there is a plane to catch.
‘Saltburn’ is in cinemas now and streaming on Prime Video from 22 December
Photographs: Hollie Fernando
Styling: Molly Haylor
Shot on location at Boston Manor House; bostonmanorhouse.org
Main image, Rosamund wears: Jacket, £5,900, blouse, £1,100, bow-tie, £210, all Dior; Bois de Rose bracelet in white gold and diamonds (just seen), £29,500, Dior Joaillerie
Hair: Davide Barbieri using Oribe. Make-up: Florrie White using Dior Beauty. Nails: Michelle Class using Manicure Collection and Miss Dior Hand Cream. Set Designer: Celina Bassili. Set Designer’s Assistant: Gabe Gilmour. Photographer’s First Assistant: Connor Tegan. Photographer’s Second Assistant: Millie Noble. Stylist’s Assistant: Hayley Downes.