ROSAMUND PIKE

PIKE FINDS PLACES ALONG A SPECTRUM TO PERFORM HER CHARACTERS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Rosamund Pike performs on a spectrum that arches from traumatized victim to sacrificial hero to selfish villain.

The debut feature film role involves the coveted casting as a Bond girl in the James Bond franchise film, Die Another Day (2002), starring Pierce Brosnan and Halle Berry. Pike plays a double agent, and thereby quite unexpectedly moves expectations of her character as a Bond girl to that of a Bond villain.

Miranda Frost is imbedded deep inside the government spy agency as the narrative winds around the globe only for the double agent to meet her match in Jinx Johnson, an American secret agent operating undercover.

In Gone Girl (2014), Pike performs the entire spectrum as the narrative moves from her character being a victim of the better part of two love birds to that of an angry, plotting homicidal sociopath.

Ben Affleck costars as that humble down to earth doting barkeep with an all American smile that gets him into trouble.

Nick and Amy seem to be the perfect match, but director David Fincher gradually pulls the love story apart in an examination of more than a bit of psychodrama behind Amy’s disappearance on the couple’s wedding anniversary.

Then in Return to Sender (2015) Pike plays the victim of a sexual assault that occurs inside her own home. Because of the casting, everyone is left wondering whether Pike will and how Pike will repeat her character reversal within the confines of the crime narrative. The plot develops into a complicated psychodrama.

The racial divide is then challenged with Pike playing biographical character Ruth Williams in A United Kingdom (2016).

Pike puts on her period piece mask for the historical narrative set in 1948 London.

Ruth meets the heir to a southern African Crown, Seretse Khama, played by David Oyelowo, without her knowing his special significance.

The love birds are smitten. And the black heir apparent proposes marriage before he departs from London during a time immediately before the installation of apartheid in southern Africa.

The initial acting mask incrementally falls apart as the realworld difficulties of interracial marriages challenge the couple to remain together. The parties receive much pushback from family and friends and government officials.

In Hostiles (2017) Pike plays a traumatized survivor of a Comanche war party in 1892.

Pike has also created various characters along the spectrum with her most compelling role being war journalist Marie Colvin, a member of the foreign press uncovering the truth about a government waging war against its own population as the Middle East falls apart in A Private War (2018).

Colvin proves to be an interesting character to have done the things she did and go to the places she did. Pike is able to compress the acting spectrum she has created to develop an entirely new screen persona, at times quite the opposite of the characters she had portrayed before.

Stanley Tucci costars as the love interest providing Colvin comfort at home in between assignments in live war zones. The script brings the two characters together, but Colvin always seems to be chasing the truth, and suffers dearly as a result.

The usual screen persona that can be a bit too feminine at times, becomes heavily shrouded behind a mask of masculinity, having been shaped by the brutality of war and the difficulties of constantly having to make readjustments to life events. Pike shows her best acting art by subtly keeping those compassionate feminine characteristics ever present.

Pike then plays quite a different character, but another biopic character nevertheless, who challenges societal norms, in 19^th century Paris. In the process of defining the character, the feminine characteristics find a more delicate balance with the masculine in Radioactive (2019).

The first woman Nobel Prize winner, Marie Curie, changed the world with groundbreaking research into the radioactivity of uranium. Curie and her husband, Pierre, found two new elements for the periodic chart that would bestow the world with just as much evil as good.

Pike shows that the feminine can be part of the more masculine determination necessary to advance scientific discovery with a radium-isolation process, ultimately leading to a second Nobel Prize for chemistry (1911), the first one having been awarded for physics (1903).

The Oscars shut Pike out though after she had earned a nomination in Gone Girl (2014), despite her much improved acting art during the years since then.

The scientist is a particular type of person who has the focus and determination that together might be seen by the public as an odd curiosity. Pike takes apart that oddity as the soon to be world famous scientist finds her place within the patriarchal science community where women had seldom breached the gender divide before.

Curie’s inertia came from proving people wrong. And Pike shows how the challenge energized the particularly unique scientific personality.

In I Care a Lot (2020) Pike returns to the double agent role as Maria Grayson, a legal guardian that targets patients for financial fraud. The good character traits are in the deep back story while Pike presents all the worst qualities of a gangster disguised as a trusted health official.

The court appointed guardian steals from the wrong people, though, and as a result, she spends a series of scene sequences fighting for her life until getting revenge.

The Pike spectrum eventually folds back in on the screen character with all her misdeeds by previous characters she created seemingly catching up to her. But the talented actor shows in the process a lot of acting art in being able to create complicated three dimensional characters that walk the line between good and evil and sometimes find purpose in either or both moral spheres.