Paul Giamatti on his obsession with Bond girl Rosamund Pike

When you meet Rosamund Pike - blond, beautiful, with a sparkle of cool intelligence - you can see why Paul Giamatti says he's been obsessed with her for years - reports the Vancouver Sun.

"Not just because she's really great-looking," Giamatti had said the day before, talking about their roles as lovers in the film adaptation of Mordecai Richler's novel Barney's Version. "But I remember watching this James Bond movie (Die Another Day, 2002) and thinking they always have great looking women in them, but where did they find this woman who's such a great f---ing actress?"

They plucked her out of a career that has ranged from sexy pin-ups to Jane Austen period pieces, that's where. Pike is a Bond girl who has gone on to bigger things - Jane Bennet in the 2005 version of Pride and Prejudice, for example, or Helen in the 2009 indie hit An Education - but she says the day she signed on for Barney's Version was her highlight.

"I walked out of the audition in New York and I felt as happy as I've felt in my life," Pike recalled. "'This is what I've been waiting for 29 years.' That what I thought. God, it was just the best - it was getting to tell the kind of story I wanted to tell since I became an actress, and getting to tell it with him, whom I just adore."

"Him" is Giamatti, an unlikely leading man playing an even more unlikely love interest. He stars as Barney Panofsky, a much-married, hard-drinking cynic: chunky, bearded, outrageous, self-destructive, funny and impossible. Pike plays Miriam, the self-possessed, mature and fully adult woman whom he meets at a bad time - at his wedding to his second wife - and then pursues with all his unprepossessing craft.

It seems like a dubious match, but Pike, 31, says she understands why someone like Miriam would be attracted to someone like Barney.

"I sort of imagine that she had a string of respectable men trying to date her, and there's a humour, and a dry sort of naughtiness about Miriam," she said in an interview at the Toronto International Film Festival, where Barney's Version had its premiere.

"External paraphernalia don't really mean much to Miriam,"Pike continued. "She's not someone to be bought by cheap romance or roses. She couldn't care less about that, a rich man spending money on her. . . . He has not got a bad soul, Barney, and she sees that. He's very funny. That's the other thing I love about this film. It starts off as this cynical, acerbic drama that I find very funny, and the cynicism morphs into something romantic. I love it."

Pike knows about unconventional love stories. She dated actor Simon Woods, whom she met when they were both at Oxford University, and who turned out to be gay. She was then famously and mysteriously dumped by Pride and Prejudice director Joe Wright on the eve of their wedding.

She said she understands the attraction between the movie's characters.

"People think I'm classic, and I'm not at all. I'm more eccentric, really. I am a bit off-kilter. I'd never go with a conventional man, so I completely understand how Miriam would go with Barney, because I would. . . . A man who woos me in an unusual way is going to get a look-in, rather than a man who is more conventional. Really."

Pike, who also plays the cello, is the daughter of two opera singers. She began her career at the age of 16 in a stage production of Romeo and Juliet, and has alternated her theatre work with such movies as The Libertine with Johnny Depp, and Fracture with Ryan Gosling and Anthony Hopkins. She was co-starring in Fugitive Pieces, the 2007 screen version of Anne Michaels' bestseller, when producer Robert Lantos gave her a copy of Barney's Version.

"Miriam is one of most beautiful characters I've ever read," she said. "I thought it was an incredible creation, but I didn't think for a minute I'd play it." When Lantos announced that his company, Serendipity Point Films, was producing Barney's Version, Pike auditioned for the role of Clara, Barney's first, more troublesome wife. Then director Richard J. Lewis saw her in a London stage production of Madame de Sade opposite Judi Dench, and asked her to try out for Miriam.

She's the most adult character in Barney's world of juvenile pursuits and childish pranks. Lewis said, "One of the words I used with her was 'mature.' I wanted this woman to be a non-reactive, very metered and mature person. I said, 'You don't need to do a lot. Keep it very down to earth, very forthcoming. She is a character with lot of integrity.'"

Pike said such quietness was challenging. "The drama of Miriam is contained. It's harder than playing a character that rails or does extreme things. . . . I felt when I was playing her that she has a power to pull people in. It wasn't her going out to people. It was her drawing people toward her."

I asked her if she knew how important the book was to Canadians, and she had just started to answer - "Yes, I knew. Witness the number of people who wanted to be extras in the film. The wedding scene is entirely populated by the Jewish community of Montreal" - when she interrupted herself. A butterfly had just flown past the window of the Toronto hotel room, a butterfly that looked very much like the logo of Serendipity Point Films.

"It's serendipity," she said: the moment and, she hopes, the movie. It is the role she had been waiting for, and it may open doors.

"There'll be more coming," Pike predicted. "As soon as you change to be so palpably different from who you are, I think people give you a bit more respect. I think. I can think I've done something I'm really proud of. I'm proud to be on screen with these people and didn't make a hash of it."

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