Rosamund Pike is jolly when she appears on my laptop screen in a cream-coloured blouse, with a cream jacket draped around her shoulders. Vanilla hair only adds to the suggestion of dessert. It is early evening, and the actor is calling from Prague, where she lives with her partner and their two sons. (She was filming the Amazon fantasy series The Wheel of Time there, and stayed put when the pandemic hit.) Is the wood-panelled opulence behind her real or virtual? “It’s a real hotel,” she protests, then starts brandishing props to prove her point. “It has water and cookies and tea, and a cup with four straws, which is how I roll.” The part that earned her an unfair reputation for iciness – the turncoat Miranda Frost from Die Another Day, which she got straight after university having never seen a Bond film – suddenly feels like centuries ago.
An hour later, Pike is still smiling but the bonhomie has curdled ever so slightly. “I started off really enjoying that,” she says as we exchange our goodbyes. “But there came a point where I began to feel really uncomfortable. It was like you held up this mirror that I didn’t want to look in.” What exactly went wonky is hard to say.
As long as we stick to her new film, we are on solid ground. Imagine if The Talented Mr Ripley went to Brideshead and got lost in the maze from The Shining with the cast of The Go-Between – that’s Saltburn. In writer-director Emerald Fennell’s follow-up to Promising Young Woman, Barry Keoghan plays Oliver, an Oxford scholarship dweeb from Merseyside taken under the wing of dreamboat Felix (Jacob Elordi), who invites him to spend the summer at his country pile. It is here that Oliver meets the whole ghastly clan, including, most riotously, Felix’s mother, Elspeth, played by Pike. Coming on like the catty kid sister of Patsy from Absolutely Fabulous, she announces her loathing of ugliness, scoffs at her daughter’s bulimia (“Fingers for dessert”) and shares memories of being a fashion model, temporary lesbian and Britpop muse. Pike’s wickedly funny performance has “Oscar nomination” stamped all over it.
Ask her about the character and she responds with a kind of horrified fascination. “She doesn’t have the ability to deal with anything vaguely real,” Pike says. “I think she believes that if she even dips a toe in the water of real feeling, it will suck her down a plughole from which she’ll never return.” There is a moment in Saltburn, heard but not shown, in which Elspeth reacts to a horrific discovery with a scream. Pike was dreading re-recording that scream during the looping session, in which sound is replaced post-shoot. “But I closed the curtain in the little booth and within seconds I was back there. I think that’s because of Elspeth bottling everything up – it had lingered in me somewhere. She becomes more and more like a ghost as the film goes on because she is starved of essential life. She has this emotional and sexual anorexia. Her control comes from denial. She loves attention but loathes proximity.”
Does Elspeth have an authentic self? “An authentic self?” Pike repeats, mockingly. “Who would want that? How boring and earnest!” Earnest is plainly one of the worst things you can be in Pike’s world, though it is not a quality to which she is immune: she said in 2020 that she took on the Golden Globe-winning role of a con artist preying on elderly people in I Care a Lot because she had recently played “a lot of very worthy women”, such as the journalist Marie Colvin in A Private War and Marie Curie in Radioactive. She was “getting too earnest for my own good”.
Instances of her dedication include the time she kept her upper arms bound with gaffer tape so she could feel Colvin’s physical tension in her limbs. “Oh gosh, I did!” she gasps when I mention this. “I’d forgotten about that. How amazing.” Preparation was not really the point with Elspeth. “It was more about trying not to do stuff. Don’t read books. She can’t stand books: not enough pictures. I was always sitting around on set reading magazines as Elspeth, feeling jealous of the people in them.”
Pike, 44, has a posh voice, Oxford education, opera singer parents, costume drama pedigree (including a spirited Pride & Prejudice directed by her former fiance, Joe Wright) and a knack for playing upper-class characters (her sweetly sad dim-bulb socialite in An Education is especially fine). Yet she sees herself as nothing at all like Elspeth, and closer perhaps to Oliver. “I’ve been in situations where I was aware I didn’t belong,” she says. “I was invited to a horse race, and as usual I worried about the code – there are so many rules in British society. I asked these girls if I needed to wear a hat. ‘Oh God, no. No hats.’ Of course, when I turned up, everybody was in hats, including the girls who told me you didn’t need one.” Her hands are pressed flat against her cheeks like a living Edvard Munch. “Probably I made a faux pas by even asking.”
Her experience of not fitting in isn’t limited to a day at the races. She is an only child who spent much of her youth in the company of adults: attending her parents’ rehearsals and performances, exploring backstage, loitering in the wings. “It was where I found people most fun. I loved the costume department, the games. The lack of seriousness.”
When she was packed off to Badminton boarding school in Bristol on a 75% scholarship, her mother warned her that she might feel a bit out of place. “She said: ‘I want you to be aware that you’ll probably find everybody has things you don’t have, and that we can’t give you.’ As a child, would I have noticed? It was her worry, and maybe it wouldn’t have been mine.”
Did she feel the disparity her mother predicted? “People would go on holidays so there was a lot of not relating to that. I don’t think I’d even been on an aeroplane. Girls would fly in to school from other countries, talking about this thing called ‘jet lag.’”
She found her tribe, as she puts it, when she joined the National Youth Theatre. “These were kids from all over the country who had the same feeling of freedom when they performed. That’s where I’ve always found freedom, not in social situations. You want to be with other people who are interested in what it feels like to be human.” Money was still an issue. If Pike wanted to stay with her fellow performers in north London, “where the fun was being had”, rather than with her parents, there were living costs to find. “I took my cello out into London and busked until I got the money. Someone gave me a tenner. I’ve never forgotten that.”
Playing Juliet in a production of Romeo and Juliet brought her an agent, which meant she already had representation by the time she was appearing in plays at Oxford. It was an advantage she kept hidden from her fellow undergraduates. “How do you know that?” she demands, as though she has caught me snooping in her bins. “Is that from some old interview? Yes, it was completely secret because I thought it would make me sound obnoxious and different.” While at university, she would sneak off to London for auditions. “I’d pay £6.90 to take the coach, the Oxford Tube. Most of the time I’d come back with my tail between my legs, wishing I’d spent the afternoon in the library instead.”
Did she feel she belonged at Oxford? “No,” she says, cautiously. “I’ve almost enjoyed it more in retrospect, realising that people who I thought were intimidating back then were just as scared as I was.” She thinks with fondness of those pre-smartphone days. “There was the Pigeon Post, where if you’d seen someone you fancied in a lecture, you could write them a note, then these guys on bikes would leave it in the right pigeonhole. I got one called ‘Looking for Cinders’. Someone had tracked me down after seeing me at a party. It was quite sweet and romantic. You had to put in a lot of hard work.”
All at once, the temperature drops without warning. “I feel a bit self-conscious, can you see?” she says. Her hands were in her lap when we started chatting, but now her arms are folded across her chest. “I get to a certain point and I don’t want to talk about myself any more. Are we nearly finished?” It’s hardly what any interviewer wants to hear but I assure her that we’re more than halfway through. Perhaps she is perturbed by these questions about being a misfit, even if they are pertinent to Saltburn. I start to explain that it would be easy to assume someone this far into a successful career had always … “Always fitted in?” she says, leaping in to finish my sentence. “No, I’ve always felt like an outsider.”
That has worked in her favour. David Fincher wanted a lesser-known quantity when he was casting the female lead in the thriller Gone Girl; Pike, who received an Oscar nomination for her whip-crackingly witty performance as the slippery Amy Dunne, was just the ticket. “I like complicated people who have lots to like and dislike about them,” she says. “Amy in Gone Girl is making fun, brilliantly, of something that is only now becoming more prevalent: people creating an identity for the media, creating what they think the world will like. This was way before the Instagram world of baby showers and opening every envelope on camera and ‘It’s a boy!’ and all that.”
Pike once said she felt as if she were trying on different identities in her teens and 20s. Has that stopped now? “Gosh, did I say that?” she exclaims, blindsided again. “No, I don’t feel that any more. I know exactly who I am.”
Who is she, then? “Who am I? Er …” She is stumped. “You’ll have to go for a drink with me sometime.” Then she panics and starts flapping her hands, any coolness melting away amusingly. “Oh my God, that sounds like I’m asking you on a date! You see, this is what happens late in the day. Oh, good lord.” She returns to the matter in hand: “You can’t have somebody saying, ‘Oh well, let me tell you about me.’ I can’t answer that!”
That’s when she offers her verdict on our conversation: the discomfort, the unflattering mirror and so on. At least it’s over now. “Thank goodness for that,” she says, letting her inner Elspeth out.
• Saltburn is in cinemas now.
