The two movies Rosamund Pike regretted making: “I feel partly to blame”
When you see Rosamund Pike being interviewed, her well-spoken Britishness a defining feature, it makes you wonder how she is able to shapeshift so effortlessly into characters like Amy Dunne in Gone Girl.
She’s a truly versatile star, whether she’s appearing as the kind-hearted Jane Bennet in Pride and Prejudice or conning the elderly in I Care a Lot, unsurprisingly standing as one of the most accomplished stars of her generation.
Yet, like every star, Pike has her regrets, although there’s little point in looking back in disdain at previous projects because, without them, she might not have achieved her star status in Hollywood. Still, there’s a little pang of regret every time she thinks of some of her earlier roles in her career, including her debut film performance as Miranda in Die Another Day.
Her part in the 007 franchise saw her star as a Bond girl, seducing Pierce Brosnan’s Bond, despite the fact that she was just 23 at the time while he was pushing 50. The Bond girl role has long caused controversy because the earlier films in the series typically showed these characters as nothing more than a bit of eye candy, their bikini-ed bodies a central part of their allure on screen, and while that depiction has progressed over time, even Pike wasn’t totally immune to the role’s controversial curse.
While many actors who have played the part found their careers suffered as a result of this type casting, Pike was able to avoid the bane, but she still experienced plenty of unwanted attention, which made her wish she’d never taken on the role in the first place.
Talking to Digital Spy in 2006, the actor revealed, “It can be quite annoying. I was on the Tube in London recently, and some teenage boys were pointing and staring and asking if I was the girl in the Bond movies. I denied it. I just didn’t like it.” It’s not that she necessarily hated the movie, but choosing to star as a Bond girl for her first movie role was perhaps something she would’ve done differently if she’d known better.
A few years later, she starred in the movie Doom, a video game adaptation that absolutely flopped, and is a film she can confidently say she regrets, because it didn’t do anything for her career. In fact, it left her rather embarrassed, and while it was an opportunity to work with some massive names, like Dwayne Johnson, Pike just didn’t fully understand the scope of the video game, and she feels like it was partly her fault for the movie’s failure.
“I feel partly to blame in that respect,” she told Collider, “I think I failed just through ignorance and innocence to fully get a picture of what Doom meant to fans at that point. I wasn’t a gamer, I didn’t understand, if I knew what I know now I would’ve dived right into all of that and got fully immersed in it like I do now.”
Doom is one of the worst stains on her career, but every actor makes mistakes; still, she can’t help but “feel embarrassed really” for being unaware of what her role and the stoy entailed, adding, “I didn’t know how to go about finding out because the internet wasn’t the place it is now for the fans to speak up. I wouldn’t have known where to find them; I do now.”
