From Bond girl to Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike’s versatility has seen her star in some massive blockbusters. Here, she talks about Syria, sleeping under the stars, and the perils of social media…

Rosamund Pike has an intoxicating effect on me. She is so mesmerisingly self-possessed, speaking gently, thoughtfully, in her own time, entirely unafraid of the silences, that it is only after I’ve replayed the interview tape at home and transcribed her soft voice that I realise how wildly luvvieish her claims are. It’s almost delicious. For example, the star of Gone Girl and the new film A Private War says that when, as a child, she sat watching her opera singer parents in their rehearsal room: “All I was really looking at was, do I believe it, do I not believe it? Whether I believed the performance, whether I believed that this was something that was real and human and true. I think all I’ve ever been interested in is truth.” Which she immediately follows with the claim that hers was not a highbrow family, thereby suggesting the existence of a whole raft of brows higher than a childhood spent searching for la verité in your mum and dad’s arias.

We have met up because she plays the war reporter Marie Colvin in A Private War, a film whose American release has gained an average score of 89% on rottentomatoes.com (ie very good reviews) and which is about to open in British cinemas. It is a breathtaking, stop-you-in-your-tracks movie with a lot of the action set during the current Syrian war and it is directed by the documentarist Matthew Heineman who blurs the lines between reportage and feature film.

It also shows how Colvin pursued the small human details of individual experiences of war, as well as the bigger political truths, and what it cost her to live inside the trauma of others – scenes of her fearlessness in the Middle East cut across to scenes of her spinning around inside her house in London, losing the plot in private. There are also parties and sex – Colvin liked high society life, too – and then there’s the relentless smoking and drinking.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘All I’ve ever been interested in is truth’: Rosamund Pike wears top and skirt by Gabriela Hearst, net-a-porter.com Photograph: Dean Chalkley/The Observer

To discuss it all, we are sitting in a rather dramatic London hotel room, where Pike has just changed out of a glamorous dress into trousers and a roll-neck jumper, to feel cosier as it gets dark outside, but she is still suitably dramatic.

“I am confident that if people go to see this film, they will have a profound experience,” she says, thinking to herself, before I’ve asked any questions. “Whether they will choose to go is another matter. I think these days, you know, committing to something we feel might be challenging sometimes doesn’t seem appealing, and yet the reward of it is always great.” (She lines every single sentence with “you know”, but not in a way that seeks reassurance, more to suggest we all surely agree.)

Pike is very happy to discuss the life of Marie Colvin at length, the role having clearly affected her deeply. “You know, there was this detail in the Vanity Fair article [which inspired the film], about how her wedding presents from her first marriage were still wrapped up in the cupboard up the stairs, and I thought: ‘I know who this person is.’” She believes Colvin could do war zones, but not the ordinary stuff. “That feeling of: if I unpack the toaster, there’s an acceptance of domesticity. But also not feeling entitled to that safe domesticity. Shove them under the stairs and probably don’t write thank-you notes for any of them. I just felt I empirically knew that person, who nonetheless wanted the big romance and wanted the wedding. And I think her life was pretty chaotic, but then you go to a place that is by definition chaotic. It’s in a war and you feel quite calm, you’re calmed. You have a purpose and a simplicity.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘My God. She doesn’t realise I’m not a journalist’: Rosamund Pike in A Private War. Photograph: Paul Conroy

To me, this sounds like a perfect description of high-functioning ADHD, a condition I suspect is common among war reporters, so we talk about that for a bit, but Pike is adept at steering the conversation back to Colvin specifically, and suggests the spirit of the dead reporter entered her while filming the pivotal scene, a recreation of a live broadcast on CNN where she bravely tells the world that Assad is a liar. “I had this fluency came out of me on that day, and it was definitely guided by Marie, I think. A kind of certainty of purpose that… I had just listened to that recording of her over and over and over again. And I knew her or something and I don’t know, it… it was quite profound really.” Pike’s voice is almost breaking as she speaks.

Her co-star, Jamie Dornan, plays the war photographer Paul Conroy, who survived the attack that killed Colvin and who also ended up staying on set to advise the whole thing. “Paul said afterwards: ‘I got my mate back for a bit there.’” Pike pauses. “God, she impressed me,” she continues, saying it’s wonderful to play someone who has such purpose, and then adds that “she was so eloquent, as eloquence can hit you – when you really need to speak, I believe that the words come.” And then she gently starts to cry. “Sorry,” she says. “I’m getting emotional.”

It was clearly an incredibly intense film to make. Many of the extras and small parts were cast from Syrian refugees living in Jordan, where they filmed. Pike says that most film directors wouldn’t even be involved with casting those people, they might just be shown some photographs, but as a documentarist, Heineman is incredibly thorough, “and so he interviewed everybody himself. Hundreds and hundreds of people.” I am concerned to know if it was made entirely clear to these extras that Pike was an actor pretending to be a journalist, and she admits that she does think that line got confused. There is one scene where she is interviewing women trapped in a place known as the “widows’ basement”, in Homs, and a mother tells her that her breast milk has dried up.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The fact we keep any form of routine is quite remarkable, really’: Rosamund Pike with her partner Robie Uniacke. Photograph: Swan Gallet/Rex/Shutterstock

“I knew that she was going to tell me about only being able to feed this tiny newborn just sugar and water, because of the trauma, but what I didn’t know is that she fled from her house as it had been car bombed. And she’d run away with her three children and then turned around and realised that one of the children wasn’t there. That was really harrowing and I didn’t know that was going to come up. Because when she then said to me: ‘I don’t want this to be words in your paper, I want the world to know my story,’ I felt, my God. She doesn’t realise I’m not a journalist.”

Pike also admits that, because they were filming in the relative safety of Jordan, these women “perhaps didn’t realise the basement would be created to feel almost exactly like the one they had been in. So I think the reliving of experience was more intense than they were anticipating.”

To me, this raises ethical questions. It also adds to the film’s power. I ask Pike if it affects her differently now, seeing footage from Syria on the news. “Well, you don’t see it on the news, do you? I mean, you really don’t see it. At all. And then the narrative is written by the winners, isn’t it? And Marie was the one who went out on CNN and called it a lie. She went in because she found it so anger-making, she knew there was this lie, but she had to go in so she could be there and say, you know, there are no terrorist gangs, there are no military targets here in Homs, this is just a city of cold starving civilians under siege with no food in one of the coldest winters we’ve ever seen, and the fact that Assad claims that they’re bombing military targets is a complete and utter lie.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Comedy turn: Pike with David Tennant in What We Did on our Holidays. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

Pike was nominated for an Oscar for her lead performance of the psychopathic Amy in Gone Girl, a thriller with a rather comic edge based on the globally bestselling novel. It was filmed a decade after she began her career playing a Bond girl in Die Another Day, which came not long after she finished her English degree at Oxford (after growing up an only child in London and then boarding school in Bristol). I wonder, then, if she has any qualms about going for mass market, commercial stuff, too?

“No! None,” she says. “If you work in the entertainment industry, you want to make a film that grown-ups want to go and watch in the cinema, and Gone Girl was the holy grail of that. You know, something that was critically acclaimed but that adults wanted to be there, part of the conversation, and queue up and see it the first night in the cinema. That is what you want, and it’s rare. It’s very rare.”

At the same time, she plays down any interest in awards, because when she was nominated, “I ended up at a dinner party, and there were voting members [of the Academy] who clearly, you know, had not seen Gone Girl and probably didn’t know I was nominated for best actress but were talking about the Oscars nonetheless, and said: ‘Oh, yeah, I heard that performance was really good.’ And you think, that is how people are voting! They’re voting on what they hear is really good.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Go girl: Pike in Gone Girl. Photograph: Allstar

Pike seemingly has no interest in rumours and hearsay, never reads her own reviews, and doesn’t engage with social media whatsoever. She is intrigued when I admit to being addicted to it, and the interview tables are now turned on me. “What do you get from it?” she wants to know. Well, the endorphin rush of someone liking something I’ve posted, I say. I post things that I think are funny and then other people find them funny, and then, er.

“And then you get this… rush?” she asks.

“It’s tragic,” I admit. “It’s really tragic.”

“Who do you think is authentic on social media?” she asks. “Do you think your humour is authentic? Do you think that actually makes you authentic?” Oh God…

Personally, my favourite work of Pike’s is comedy – I don’t think the family film What We Did On Our Holidays, with David Tennant, gets enough credit for how hysterically funny it is. She plays it very straight, and her po-facedness works brilliantly in a comic setting. She is similarly mesmerising in An Education, where she plays Helen, the glamorous but ignorant society girlfriend who takes Carey Mulligan’s character under her wing and is baffled by her learning. All of which makes me keen to see a forthcoming series written by Nick Hornby, State of the Union, wherein Pike and Chris O’Dowd play a married couple who sit awkwardly in the pub before each marriage counselling session.

In her own life, she was once engaged to the director Joe Wright, after they fell in love while making Pride and Prejudice together, but he called it off upsettingly close to the big day. That’s now in the past, as she has two children with the man she calls “my other half”, an Eton-educated mathematician always referred to in the tabloids as “former heroin addict Robie Uniacke”, though that is in the past, too. They live in a Georgian townhouse in Islington with their two young sons, Atom and Solo, who have apparently learned Chinese from their polymath father, and who came out to Jordan with their dad during the filming, young enough to simply enjoy scenes with things like exploding vehicles, although she had to let them believe the baddies wouldn’t get her in the end. (Spoiler alert: they do.)

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘You want to make films grown-ups want to go and watch at the cinema, something adults want to queue up and see on the first night’: Rosamund Pike Photograph: Dean Chalkley/The Observer

At other times they would stay at the hotel, playing Lego, and then the whole family went to Wadi Rum in the desert, “where we just put down these blankets against a sort of rocky outcrop and built a fire and slept in our clothes. The boys still talk about it. They call it the biggest bedroom. The sky. It’s very easy, I think, when you have children, to start saying no to things. And yet you never regret saying yes. That’s our motto in life at the moment – because you don’t look back on your life and remember the things you said no to.”

Pike says her other half is a feminist, “and it’s a thing I prize highly and appreciate daily. Someone who’s self-confident enough and secure enough to deal with this crazy… It is crazy, how our life is. Just the constant shifting. The fact we keep any form of routine is quite remarkable, really.”

She is clearly gripped by true stories of remarkable women. Which works in her relationship, as her partner “always had a library of feminist literature and books on pioneering women. Before there was the sort of,” she starts chuckling, “all those Good Night Stories for Rebel Girls books. One of my friend’s daughters was given one and she said, ‘Oh God, not another book about amazing women.’” She laughs, we say goodbye, and she heads off to think about playing another one.

A Private War is in cinemas from 15 February. A special screening followed by a Q&A with Rosamund Pike, Jamie Dornan, Paul Conroy and Matt Heineman will be broadcast live to cinemas on 4 February (aprivatewar.film). Rosamund Pike is a supporter of the Mines Advisory Group, a charity that removes landmines (maginternational.com)

Hair by David Barbiere at Caren using R+Co; makeup by Amanda Grossman at the Wall Group using Pai and Inika; photographer’s assistants Tom Frimley and Domizia Salusetl; fashion assistant Penny Chan; shot at the Corinthia hotel in Whitehall Place

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