It’s 10 p.m. in London, and Rosamund Pike has just roasted a chicken, finished the washing up, folded the laundry and tended to a wee sick one. Now she sits for a moment in her kitchen, spent but happy, her four-day-old baby son snoozing in his basket beside her.
The setting may be calm and pastoral, in keeping with Pike’s new life, but it’s sharply at odds with the actor we now know her to be. This year she delivered a career-making performance as Amy Dunne, the stunningly beautiful, dangerously secretive and cynically vicious wife in David Fincher’s “Gone Girl,” who can both swan her way into her husband Nick’s heart and slice the life out of a lover with fatally poor judgment.