Rosamund Pike interview: ‘I Care a Lot,’ ‘Radioactive’
Two-time Golden Globe Award nominee Rosamund Pike is back in contention this year for two more nominations. She contends in the Best Film Drama Actress category for the previously-released biopic “Radioactive,” in which she portrays double Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie, as well as in Best Film Comedy/Musical Actress as the antihero protagonist of the upcoming Netflix release “I Care a Lot.”
In her exclusive interview with Gold Derby about the latter film (watch the video above), she terms the life-or-death thriller “a dark comedy,” noting that adopting an “ironic and satirical” tone for this film was its “best bet at getting an audience and getting awareness for this subject matter” of elder abuse. An Oscar nominee for 2014’s “Gone Girl,” Pike stars in “I Care a Lot” as the fictional Marla Grayson, whom Netflix describes as “a professional, court-appointed guardian for dozens of elderly wards whose assets she seizes and cunningly bilks through dubious but legal means.”
Pike says with reference to her director/producer/writer, “J Blakeson‘s been quite clever in he hasn’t really given you anyone else to root for.” She continues, “The most interesting villains are villains who can act, because it’s very unsettling when you somebody you know to be ruthless and coldhearted suddenly pulls off a very convincing act of being reasonable and sweet and pretty affable and that’s what Marla does.” Pike reveals about toeing the line between heroism and villainy on screen, “If you want a character who’s bad, they got to stay bad. They can’t suddenly ask for your empathy as well as asking for your attention on a fun and dastardly ride.”
An Emmy winner for her previous major foray into television (Best Short Form Actress for 2019’s “State of the Union”), Pike is returning to television for her next couple of projects and making her producing debut. She explains, “It’s a real interest in other things. I’m looking for other books and most of them, funnily enough, are not vehicles for me. It’s just a love of literature, which is another of my passions and I suppose a chance to be involved in stories that I never otherwise would be.” She is attached only as an executive producer to the adaptation of “The Three-Body Problem” by “Game of Thrones” showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss for Netflix.
Pike qualifies, “That’s not a vehicle or anything for me — not a book that I fell in love with and wanted to produce because I thought, ‘This is great for me.’ It’s just a book I fundamentally believed needed to have a life on screen with very brilliant minds attached.” Currently filming in Prague, Pike is starring in Amazon’s “The Wheel of Time,” which she is also producing. “Again, it’s another genre I don’t know (fantasy) and it felt like an exciting opportunity and I thought, ‘If I’m going to be here for a long time, then I want to be involved in a very deep way,” explains Pike.
