Rosamund Pike’s 10 favourite movies of all time
Rosamund Pike – classy, ambitious, and devious. Those are the words that often seem to hover around almost all of her characters.
Frankly, Pike’s own taste in cinema reflects the same nuanced elegance. Having broke out portraying ‘Bond girl’ Miranda Frost in Die Another Day, she truly established herself with her lead performance in David Fincher’s Gone Girl. From there, Pike’s other noteworthy roles include sweet Jane Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, crooked guardian to the elderly Marla Grayson in I Care a Lot, and egocentric aristocrat Elspeth Catton in Saltburn.
Clearly, something about 1960s cinema speaks to Pike. Among her selections, there’s the two-part Swedish drama I Am Curious, a quasi-documentary set up expressly to explore all the pressing topics of the day.
In addition, A Taste of Honey makes an appearance, depicting a makeshift family emerging when a pregnant teenager has her baby with only the support of a friend. There’s also the Czech-language film Loves of a Blonde, which seems to poetically tie into Pike’s own shadowy blonde bombshell persona, following a young woman pursuing the man she wants to Prague, to the chagrin of his family.
All the entries on her list seem to follow an underlying logic: Darling follows a model sleeping her way to success in ’60s London, Daisies is about two women both named Marie committing to materiality, Mean Streets centres on one of Martin Scorsese’s famous gangsters trying to balance love and power. The connections to Pike’s own career are evident in the characters she gravitates towards, with stories exploring the dark corners of human existence, where greed intersects with desire against the backdrop of an unforgiving world.
At this moment, I can only think of Marla’s words in I Care a Lot: “Every fortune ever accumulated started with a leap of faith. But before you take that leap, first take a long, hard look at yourself. Know who you are.” Marla decided a long time ago that she wanted to be rich and that she wouldn’t get there by sticking to the rules of a game that’s fucked up to begin with.
“What am I willing to sacrifice to achieve my dreams?” she muses. “What lines will I not cross? Don’t try to be anyone else. Just know who you are and use that to your advantage.”
The outliers to Pike’s preferences for the ‘60s are the following: Brief Encounter, in which many of the themes of the Wheel of Time star’s career are boiled down to the simple plot of a woman running across a man who tempts her to cheat on her husband. Pike also suggested that Saltburn has a spot among her favourites in her Letterboxd interview, starting her response with “Our film, number one”. Which makes sense, as Saltburn is also about a troubled protagonist unapologetically pursuing his obsession with his friend’s family and their obscene wealth.
But her selection that is truly unique and attention-grabbing is the hopeful ET the Extra-Terrestrial. One of the most touching films about friendship ever created, its spot on this list perhaps reveals something else: that even an artist who so excels at portraying humanity’s worst nature knows the value of something pure and uplifting.
Through interviews with Letterboxd and Criterion, Rosamund Pike has revealed her favourite movies, and you can find this full list below.
Rosamund Pike’s 10 favourite movies:
- Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945)
- A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961)
- L’Eclisse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962)
- Darling (John Schlesinger, 1965)
- Loves of a Blonde (Miloš Forman, 1966)
- Daisies (Věra Chytilová, 1966)
- I Am Curious (Vilgot Sjöman, 1967-68)
- Mean Streets (Martin Scorsese, 1973)
- ET the Extra-Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1982)
- Saltburn (Emerald Fennell, 2023)
