What to Know About the Star of Gone Girl

Lynn Hirschberg


Photo by Willy Vanderperre, Styled by Olivier Rizzo

David Fincher cast Rosamund Pike for the leading role in Gone Girl because she was an unfamiliar face. Not for long.

Prada top and dress. Beauty 
note: Mess things up a bit 
with Tigi Bedhead Hard to 
Get Texturizing Paste.Photography by Willy Vanderperre, Styled by Olivier Rizzo
Prada top and dress. Beauty note: Mess things up a bit with Tigi Bedhead Hard to Get Texturizing Paste.Photography by Willy Vanderperre, Styled by Olivier Rizzo


"I have a fondness for difficulties," Rosamund Pike told me as her trainer, Holly Lawson, who is the No. 5 welterweight female boxer in the world, taped Pike's hands at the Box 'N Burn gym in Santa Monica. It was a sunny morning in mid-January, and Pike was hell-bent on learning how to box. Seven months earlier, when she was cast by the director David Fincher in the highly coveted role of Amy Dunne in Gone Girl-the movie adaptation of Gillian Flynn's dark, twisty best-seller about a woman who disappears on her fifth wedding anniversary and may (or may not) have been murdered by her husband-Pike, at Fincher's request, began enthusiastically working out almost daily with Lawson. "In the past, during action scenes, I used to worry that I ran like a girl," Pike, 35, explained. Lawson showed her how to make a proper fist. "Now you're ready to go," she said as Pike climbed into a ring in the corner of the gym. "Let's hit!" Pike said, sounding gleeful.

See Pike's photo shoot at WMagazine.com

As Lawson coached her through different combinations, Pike maintained a steeliness. Her idea of fun seemed to entail determination, intensity, and excellence: She was obsessed with landing her punches. "This is rather like a dangerous pantomime," said Pike, hardly sweating, after 20 minutes. The actress is tall and lean, and her face is classically beautiful-in the style of old-school movie star blondes like Grace Kelly and Tippi Hedren. Like theirs, her features can seem almost masklike, and it is that opaque quality that makes her ideal for playing Amy, a complex character whose alluring all-American exterior belies a wicked side. The film, which is slated for release in October, veers from the plot of the book in significant ways that the actress is forbidden to reveal. Pike, who is English, Oxford educated, and the only child of two opera singers, portrays Amy over a period of nearly a decade and in moods that range from blissful to diabolical, lovesick to murderous.

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"I liked that people didn't immediately know who Rosamund was," Fincher said on the Los Angeles set of Gone Girl at the Red Studios Hollywood. As on any Fincher production-from films as diverse as Fight Club and The Social Network-the sets for Gone Girl were fully realized: There was food in the cupboards of the Dunnes' suburban kitchen, and Amy's office was actually functional. ("If your character suddenly needs a paper clip, it is right there waiting for you," Pike said.) Fincher is known for his star-is-born casting. Three years ago, he transformed Rooney Mara, a virtual unknown, into a sensation as Lisbeth Salander in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. And though actresses like Natalie Portman and Charlize Theron were interested in the Gone Girl role, Fincher wanted Amy to be played by someone less familiar. "I'd always liked Rosamund in movies, but I didn't really know her," Fincher said. "That made her very interesting."

Pike's cinematic history is unusual: Her first film audition, in 2000, was for the role of Miranda Frost in the James Bond film Die Another Day. "Before I was cast as a Bond girl, I had never actually seen a James Bond movie," Pike told me post-workout over a turkey burger at Pono Burger, a nearby restaurant. "The Bond audition was strange-I'd just come back from China, doing the kind of hippie-backpacking thing that people do when they leave school. All the girls in this beautiful old town house waiting to see the casting director were sleek and dressed in what seemed to me like leather. I was wearing something very thick and woolly. I was convinced I was all wrong."

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