Rosamund Pike talks `Doom` and `Pride & Prejudice`

Rosamund Pike had a ball playing Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice - but it was nothing compared to the fun she had slashing up monsters. She talks to Will Hodgkinson of The Guardian.

Rosamund Pike does not look like the type of woman to enjoy beating monsters to a bloody pulp, but appearances can be deceptive. "In the original computer game of Doom, you not only have to kill things. You have to pulverise them," says the actor - a quintessential English rose with porcelain skin, perfect poise and impeccable manners - in a disarmingly casual way. "You get more points for a pulpy mash than you do for a dead body. It's rather violent, but they are demons, so perhaps that makes such actions acceptable."


Rosamund Pike in Doom (left) and Pride & Prejudice (right).

In a fairly extreme move against typecasting, Pike has followed up playing the fragrant Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice with the rather less fragrant Dr Samantha Grimm in the film adaptation of Doom, one of the goriest computer games ever made. One of her tasks for the part involved dissecting the demons that are causing the humans so much trouble. Believing that she should look as if she had done that sort of thing before, she took a crash course in anatomy at Prague's medical school.
"It was only then that I realised that I had such a fascination for body parts," says Pike, wide-eyed as she picks at some marinated olives. We are in the refined, discreet confines of J Sheekey, a favourite actors' haunt in Covent Garden, London. "The experience was rather disturbing, though. I joined the classes of the second-year medics, who presented me with my own fresh cadaver before leaving me with a doctor. I had a white coat and a pair of goggles and I was given a thing called a bone saw, which is a very frightening rotator blade. There I was, ready to make an incision on this poor fellow's sternum, when the doctor who was with me got a beep on his pager and left the room. Mmm, these olives are delicious!"

Pike, left alone in a Victorian morgue in Prague with a body on a marble slab, had no choice but to get sawing. She claims that the blood-spattered experience acted as invaluable research for Doom, but I point out that the anatomy of mythical demons might well be different to that of humans. "That's a very pertinent point," she says. "But at the crux of the story of Doom is the idea that we're humanising the monsters we kill, anatomically as well as emotionally."

It's a far cry from the English country houses and gentle satire of Pride and Prejudice, which would seem to be a more natural acting home for Pike. Joe Wright's film is a traditional, bucolic costume drama that remains faithful to Jane Austen's celebrated novel of romance and social observation. Pike plays Jane Bennet, the elder sister of Keira Knightley's Lizzie, as a quiet, benign soul with only the slightest hint of mischief in her. "Filming Pride and Prejudice was a joy and made for one of my happiest summers ever," she says. "It could well be that the story brings out the best in people - and it sounds so cheesy, but we really did behave like a family. The girls playing the younger sisters had never been on a film set before and wanted to socialise all the time, so we picnicked, hung out in a beautiful country house and went swimming naked in a lake. It was idyllic."

Pike has the kind of easy confidence that only the highly educated and privileged possess, albeit one that is tempered with the typical actor's need for reassurance. "Did you like the film?" she asks, more than once. "Did you find it romantic? I bypassed Pride and Prejudice at university and didn't realise that it's not just social mores and falling in love: it's about realising the impact you have on people. It's about realising that you can hurt others by saying too much - like Lizzie - or too little, like Jane. For that reason, I didn't want the relationship between Keira and I to be based around brushing each other's hair and doing up corsets, and I wanted Jane to be a little bit more fun than she normally is."

This lit-crit approach to taking on a role is unusual for an actor, but Pike studied English literature at Oxford, working hard enough to get a 2:1 while developing the acting career she had started in school. The only child of opera singers, Pike was 19 when she landed her first television role in A Rather English Marriage, and she forsook drama school for learning on the job and finishing her degree. "I don't think Rada wanted me, actually," she says, when I ask why she never went down that route. "When I was at Oxford I had a boyfriend at Central [School of Speech and Drama] and it looked like the most fantastic life, but I think not going makes you more free. Nothing can teach you what it's like to work on a film set, and the best education there can be for an actor is to walk up the street and observe human nature."

Pike's film career started abruptly when, straight out of university, she landed the role of the ice-cool beauty, fencing expert and all-round fantasy figure Miranda Frost in 2002's James Bond movie, Die Another Day. "When you're dressed up like Miranda Frost, people assume you have a similar character, but I was 21 and quaking inside," she says. Die Another Day marked the 40th anniversary of the Bond series, which meant that Pike was thrown into press conferences even before she had stepped onto a set. "It was terrifying. I remember walking round a corner of a makeshift stage and being blinded by a bank of the world's press, with all these people shouting 'Over here, over here!' and a whirring of cameras that sounded like machine-gun fire. I was about to go at the knees like a drunkard, but Pierce Brosnan held me up at the waist and supported me. Thank God I don't have that in my day-to-day life."

Pike is at the point in her career where she could exchange privacy and normality for worldwide fame if she wanted to. But she can easily walk halfway across London without getting recognised. "I think you can make a choice with that kind of thing," she says. "You can certainly keep a low public profile if you want to. Ideally, I'd like to be living in upstate New York, in a house that I could renovate and fill with books and clothes, while being offered the kind of parts that are currently going to Kate Winslet and Nicole Kidman."

She also has a non-famous boyfriend, a reasonable proficiency in cello and piano and an awareness of her own limitations. "I think it's OK to play to your strengths, and if I have a quality of Englishness that people like, I won't hide that," says Pike on her ladylike appeal. "I'm probably not going to play a junkie and that's OK because there are other people who will do it better. A view that's been held for a long time is that the best way to prove oneself as an actor is to play the grittiest roles out there. I don't agree with that."

Pride and Prejudice is out on September 16. Doom is out on October 28.

Thanks to `JP` for the alert.

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