© Twentieth Century Fox
She’s played a Bond girl and a Greek queen, but Rosamund Pike is an enigma to American audiences – just what director David Fincher wanted for the wife at the center of the toxic marital thriller “Gone Girl.”
“Rosamund was someone that I had seen in four or five different movies over ten years, and I never got a bead on her,” he has said. “I never got a sense of who she was. And I pride myself on being able to watch actors and sort of know instinctively what their utility belt is.”
The film based on Gillian Flynn’s blockbuster novel opens nationwide Friday but made a splash last week at the New York Film Festival, winning raves for Pike and co-star Ben Affleck. As Amy and Nick Dunne, they’re a picture-perfect couple of New York City writers whose marriage sinks into resentments once they move to the Midwest after layoffs. Amy vanishes on their fifth anniversary, leaving behind bloodstains, a diary, and suspicions that Nick can’t shake amid the resulting media firestorm.
Critics say Affleck “gives what may be the most natural performance of his career” and that Pike is “a star presence here from her very first scene.”
Rolling Stone wrote: “[T]his is a smashing, award-caliber breakthrough you’ll be talking about for years. Does she possess the role of Amy, or does the role possess her? Either way, she’s dazzling, depraved and dynamite.”
Pike’s roles have delved into dark territory before, but none on such a scale as this. Learn more about her in my Word and Film piece here before she’s “Gone.”