Rosamund Pike: the secret avgeek

Words: Jane Crowther
Photography: Matt Holyoak
Styling: Jan Králíček

Rosamund Pike looks thoroughly at ease as she stands on the wing of an Airbus A350 in BA’s cavernous engineering hangar at London Heathrow. Though she’s more than 50 feet off the floor and harnessed – in a Marques’Almeida floral jumpsuit with Dior sneakers and jewels – she seems unfazed. Perhaps that’s the composure that runs through many of her performances (she was the ultimate ‘cool girl’ in David Fincher’s Gone Girl, after all), but also because, as she later confesses over afternoon tea, she’s an “aviation nerd”, who has visited the Boeing factory on her holidays and toured the Concorde Alpha Delta G-BOAD at the Intrepid Museum. And this is not the first time she’s balanced on the wing of a plane. “Breitling has a vintage biplane,” she recalls as she forks a cake. “I went up to a thousand feet strapped on to the wing, but I did it in a 1920s aviation costume with plus-four trousers. Turns out that wasn’t very practical – it was all flapping about!”

On the ground, the elegant Pike, who played the delicious Elspeth in Emerald Fennell’s watercooler film, Saltburn, duplicitous Miranda Frost in Die Another Day, delightful Jane Bennet in Pride & Prejudice and ballsy Marie Colvin in A Private War with such aplomb, is unflappable. She doesn’t bat an eye at climbing into the jet engine of a Boeing 787 dressed in white feathers and pearls. Her fascination with aviation began as a girl growing up in Earl’s Court with her opera singer parents and hearing the sonic boom of Concorde overhead twice a day. She didn’t board a plane until she was 11 but now, as a busy actor, producer and Dior brand ambassador, her life is filled with air travel. Ever the observer of human behaviour to inform her acting, Pike finds flights an endless source of material. “You get tremendous kindness from people on aircraft and you see others in a rage. I do think it’s a sort of pressure cooker.” She relates a recent experience of being delayed by a forced landing for passenger illness and the very different reactions of other travellers. “You think: that, there, is a story.”

Pike has been telling stories on screen and stage ever since she got an agent while studying English at Oxford University. Though her breakthrough came with her induction into the ‘Bond girl’ hall of fame, she’s been drawn towards portraying complicated and powerful women ever since. Her latest role is no different – as the powerhouse Moiraine, a member of the Aes Sedai at the centre of Amazon’s fantasy series, The Wheel of Time, a role that expanded to her becoming a producer on the show and the award-winning narrator of the audiobooks. In two seasons, Moiraine has been a determined force seeking the Dragon Reborn and, in the third, she comes up against perhaps her most dangerous trials yet. “She realises that she needs to follow someone in order to still lead,” Pike says. “This season is finally exactly where I want the show to be and always dreamed of it being.” Her enthusiasm for the universe created by Robert Jordan’s 14 books has taken her by surprise. “I never saw myself in a fantasy,” she adds. “I thought it might be quite relaxing to be a magical sorceress with really kick-ass powers. You know, I got to flounce around in a beautiful, elegant cloak and do cool s**t. But it’s not in my nature to take it easy. I think my curiosity is always pulling me deeper.” It was that curiosity that led her to the role, having seen a background artist holding the book while she filmed I Care a Lot in Boston and subsequently connecting with him to uncover deep fan intel: “Robert Jordan wrote so many astonishing women that can be representative for women from all over the world. It’s a very positive thing to put a diverse cast of women on the screen.”

It was The Wheel of Time that prompted a 2019 move to Prague (where the show was filmed) with her partner, Robie Uniacke and two sons. “Any chance that you’re connected to Central Europe, it’s a wonderful experience,” she says of living in the Czech capital. “It reignited a lot of music in me, because it’s a very musical place, and I started playing my cello again. I love other engine, wheely things, as well as planes. I have a Citroën DS from the 1970s, which I had in Prague. I’ve had it since I was 24 and we drove it back to London in the summer of 2023.” The road trip tested her signature calm when the car conked out in France and she had to FaceTime her mechanic. “I removed the thermostat and took the engine partly to bits outside a Carrefour. It was an adventure.”

Her partner and children speak Mandarin, so the family enjoy a trip to China once a year and their fascination with the country and culture has led to her exec-producing hit sci-fi show Three Body Problem, based on the book trilogy by Cixin Liu. But she bemoans that she’s still not fluent in the language herself. “I understand a lot just by osmosis. I started learning. But then when you get busy on one of these films, there is no time for anything.” The family are now settled back in London (with the Citroën) where Pike’s next challenge awaits, returning to the stage in Inter Alia, the new play from Prima Facie playwright Suzie Miller. It’s the first time the actor has done theatre since her 2010 tour of Hedda Gabler and the first she has originated since Hitchcock Blonde in 2003. “There’s a tremendous thrill in being the one to create a role for the first time,” she says. “And I’m about to embark on my research… you go to a very humble place where you realise you know nothing at all, and it’s all the specificity of the real people that brings the world to life.”

People-watching is a huge part of Pike’s process – she still meets FBI agents for lunch, having researched them for The Informer. “No matter how good your imagination is, there’ll be an aspect of the job that you won’t have thought of,” she says, explaining how female FBI agents need trousers with belt loops and often have to tailor them because they’re a rarity in womenswear. In Inter Alia, she’ll be playing a judge and mother whose son is accused of rape, so will be quizzing judges on the minutiae of their lives. “I like watching things where I recognise truisms about being human in what I see,” she explains. “I want people to come to the theatre and see themselves.” She admits to already having anxiety dreams about performing live but is looking forward to the marinating rehearsal process and what she calls “the luxury of failure, of being able to take risks and fail in private.” The time taken to perfect a role is not always available in screen work: “I just finished a film and I’m going over scenes that I’ve done, thinking, ‘Oh, maybe I should have done it like that, or tried that speech in another way.’ It’s agony.”

The film she’s just completed and is agonising over is a Netflix film, Ladies First, with Sacha Baron Cohen. It’s about a misogynistic man who wakes from being knocked out to a world where gender roles have been reversed. “The women are in charge, men are objectified and the ones who have to compete at the level of youth and beauty, and women have the status, the power, the money, and the strength,” she chuckles. Doing a rom-com is on her wish list of roles and this one takes a step towards that: “There’s some rom in the com”. She’s also wrapped a real-time psychological  thriller, Hallow Road, with Matthew Rhys, playing parents racing to their daughter who has been involved in a fatal accident (she shadowed paramedics for that one). Then she shot Guy Ritchie’s latest, In the Grey, in Tenerife. The next project is something suitably zeitgeisty. TV show Thumblite explores the tech-bro world in Silicon Valley and Pike plays the corporate woman powerbroking at its core. “It couldn’t be more timely,” she says, “as AI starts to rev up, and we start to look at how these big tech companies are growing so rapidly with no guardrails.”

AI is a constant threat to actors, but Pike insists there’s no substitute for the real thing. “There’s that interplay of a live performer with an audience that can change from night to night,” she says. “You could never have that with AI – the sweat and grit of life, the beautiful mistakes. We’re all looking for perfection, aren’t we? It’s like selfies – it looks nothing like the person you know. That’s the version of yourself that you approve of. But the person I know and love is so much more interesting…” With her perfect profile and cut-glass accent hiding a nerdy curiosity, she is certainly a case in point.

The Wheel of Time season three premieres on Prime Video on 13 March and episodes of the show are available to watch on board from April; Hallow Road premieres at SXSW in March; Inter Alia opens at the National Theatre on 10 July