From Autumn Issue 63
Glass speaks to English actor Rosamund Pike about the wonder of treading the boards at the National, the riddle of illusion in her latest film, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, and her moments of serendipity
“I never see the stage from this angle,” Rosamund Pike begins. We’re in the Lyttleton stalls at the National Theatre and it’s the final week of her play, Inter Alia.
Earlier that day, she had been walking the corridors of the National as if it were an extension of her own house. Waltzing through the halls at one point, her key-card stops working. “I haven’t left yet,” she tells security, laughing, “I’ve still got three more days!”
In Suzie Miller’s Inter Alia, Pike plays Jessica Parks, a Crown Court judge whose ordered world unravels under the pressures of the legal system and motherhood when her teenage son is accused of sexual assault. It is an emotionally taxing part, but Pike inhabits it with the same precision that made her character in Gone Girl, Amy Dunne, so chilling.
Photographer: Zoe McConnell
Yet her strength in such roles is unsurprising. Since her Oxford days, she’s gravitated towards women at an angle to conventional femininity – composed, mysterious, morally complex. From the cool detachment of her Bond girl in Die Another Day to the warmth of Jane Bennet in Pride & Prejudice, the resolve of Marie Colvin in A Private War, and the predatory charm of Marla Grayson in I Care a Lot, few British actors of her generation display such range with comparable poise.
Her next act, however, looks decidedly more playful. In Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, the third instalment of the glossy magician-heist franchise, Pike steps into the role of Veronika Vanderberg, a crime syndicate matriarch. Taken together, Inter Alia and Now You See Me: Now You Don’t represent two poles of Pike’s artistry – the searingly intimate and the unabashedly theatrical.
At the National, Pike ushers me in as if she is about to guide me into a secret world. First, the dressing room, a compact yet stylish sanctuary where the grit of theatre collides with her own sly glamour. A sink is tucked neatly in the corner, a small couch softened by flowers and postcards, carrots waiting to be eaten, and a fridge humming quietly with the promise of wine.
On the table, glasses are scattered as if friends had just left. To the left, Freddie Mercury stares out from a collection of printouts, his presence as bold as ever. “He’s my muse,” Pike declares matter-of-factly, pointing to one particular image. “I love watching him on stage. He uses the microphone as his co-star. That’s what I had to do with Jessica [who loves karaoke].”
Photographer: Zoe McConnell
Pinned outside her door hangs a mock-up of a Vogue cover, cheekily assembled by her cast and crew. Its headlines poke fun at her devotion to her pepper grinder and crown her “the Queen of Karaoke”. The humour lands easily because it is true. Pike is cherished here not for her hauteur but for her humanity, her knack for being unguarded and cheeky when so many in her position would not be.
Then she beckons me onto the stage. Suddenly, it feels almost illicit, as though I have slipped past an invisible boundary into the machinery of theatre. The lights burn hot above us, the furniture rests in awkward half-movement, and Pike, completely at ease, narrates the scene with an actor’s authority.
“Come along, do not be shy,” she laughs, gesturing towards the middle of the stage where the kitchen table, surrounded by chairs, stands. “This is one half of the kitchen that moves. And, well, that on the floor is last night’s hummus,” she laughs again. “Does the hummus ever end up off the stage during the play?” I ask. “Oh yes, all the time,” she replies with a grin, her eyes glinting with mischief.
From her position, the auditorium appears forbidding, a sea of shadows broken only by the first three rows. “I cannot really see the audience, just the first three rows”, she says. Then, as if eager to try another perspective, she adds, “Now let’s sit in the stalls. I have never seen what the audience sees.”
Currently, the 46-year-old is at a crossroads. She’s in a space where she has to say goodbye to Inter Alia and start the next chapter of her life. There’s an air of nostalgia as she’s taking in her surroundings. The sound of the empty theatre, the calmness ahead of the show, the stillness of the National when nobody is around to witness it. It’s grounding. And that’s what she needs after having spent the last few months of her life exploring the ramifications of sexual assault and being a voice for all the women who have long been forced into silence.
“There is a potency in the female experience,” she states. “It’s all women waiting for me at Stage Door now. All women. And when I did my last play [Hedda Gabler] 14 years ago, most of the people wanting autographs were men.”
Photographer: Zoe McConnell
“It’s the things I’ve explored in the last 14 years with my work that have meant that, in most of the letters I’ve been receiving, many and meaningful, women have said they felt their experience was captured somehow through some work I’ve done, or that they’ve been seen. And it’s pretty amazing.”
What more could a performer want than to make people feel seen and understood, to ensure that their storytelling serves a larger purpose? In Pike’s case, it’s about making women’s experiences feel visible, heard and represented on stage, their stories validated and given the weight they deserve.
“I feel like Taylor Swift,” she laughs. “I’ve got an arm full of bracelets that people have made me, with references from The Wheel of Time [the US fantasy TV series] and from this play. In my dressing room, I’ve got friendship bracelets up my arm. I have to be careful: one night I was still wearing them and I was on the lift about to come through the stage, and I was, like, ‘open the door!’ The drumming had already started and we had to be so quick [to take them off]. Then I came up as if nothing had happened, through the floor,” Pike recalls wittily.
The anecdote underscores a central aspect of Pike’s approach. She treasures connection, whether it is an audience writing letters, fans threading beads into bracelets, or the quiet exchange between performer and spectator in a theatre. That instinct, she explains, is rooted in her background.
Photographer: Zoe McConnell
“My parents, actually, they’re both opera singers. My mum said that the human ear is not built to take in amplified sound. All the subtlety that we hear is actually meant for the natural voice,” she explains. “There’s a level of communication when we have to listen, like listening to birdsong or listening to what’s around us right now. If you actually pay attention, it’s all about listening.”
Moving on to the crux of the play, she observes, “Sexual assault is a crime where both people think they could be telling the truth. Probably they’re not, but they could be. If one person assures you that they did not grant consent, and the other person is completely confident that there was consent given, they both can be right. And then there’s also the illusion of your child being the one that you think you have. Jessica is someone whose child was bullied as a young boy, and she’s grown up with that narrative of feeling that he needs to be protected. Somewhere in the 15 to 18 range, he’s grown out of it. He’s got a tribe now, he’s included and she’s missed it. She’s still holding on to the little one who was bullied. Of course, she’s right, because inside the adult is always the bullied child. The bullied child is always there.”
It’s in reflections like these that Pike reveals the deeper questions that drive her work. What is truth, what is deceit, what is illusion? The narratives we tell one another, but also the ones we tell ourselves? And it’s striking that her next project continues to circle around deception, albeit in an entirely different register. Miles away from the solemn world of Inter Alia, Now You See Me: Now You Don’t still toys with the same riddles of perspective. Who do you trust?
Photographer: Zoe McConnell
“When I started working on Now You See Me: Now You Don’t, I wondered about Veronika,” Pike muses. “She’s the type of character who would want to have children for the optics. I thought maybe it might be useful for her business image if she were the mother of five kids. That was part of everything. She’s got the race team, she’s got this global business, she’s a woman CEO of this company. One of the things I wanted in the boardroom of her diamond mining company was subtle references to her being one of these women whose narrative is all about empowering women. But if you notice, and maybe it’s only on a second viewing, there are all these women of colour, African miners, on the wall behind me in the boardroom. Yet everybody at that table, apart from me, is a white man.”
She wonders about Veronika’s motives: “I feel that part of her narrative is definitely about supporting women, empowering women, and then she doesn’t do any of it.”
There is magic in deception and truth, especially in Now You See Me: Now You Don’t. Pike has experienced moments explained only by serendipity, small coincidences and chance encounters that lead to more than expected. The key is openness, and therein lies life’s magic. Pike recalls a few of her own serendipitous moments.
“Chance encounters are always magical. The little coincidences, the little relevancies, where somebody comes back into your life when you least expect it. I do have an example. Celia Imre, whom I worked with when I was 21, came to see Inter Alia. The National Theatre sometimes leaves out things they’re getting rid of, like old photographs from the archives or postcards. When I worked with Celia Imre, we were working with Alan Bates, the wonderful actor who has sadly passed. The next day, I was going up for my warm-up and the only postcard left on the table was a beautiful headshot of Alan Bates in a Simon Gray play. I thought, see, that’s just because Celia was here last night. Now Alan Bates is going to come with me to my dressing room and take me through the last week of the play.”
Photographer: Zoe McConnell
Pike’s attention to life’s subtleties gives her work its resonance. Now You See Me: Now You Don’t reflects this theatrically, offering the audience a fleeting sense of holding the universe in their hands. Up close, patterns blur, but from a distance, coincidences and chance reveal invisible connections. You must take a leap of faith, follow the threads and watch the world quietly sparkle with possibility. Such moments of chance, coincidence and intuition, where the ordinary suddenly feels significant, have punctuated Pike’s life long before she stepped onto a stage or in front of a camera.
Another instance is her audition for Miranda Frost in Die Another Day in 2002. “I remember leaving my Bond audition – my first film audition. I think it was a recall. I walked back along Knightsbridge and went into Harrods. I used to like Helena Rubinstein’s cosmetics. And they were doing a promotion, a sort of competition. They said if you use this red lipstick and kiss a card, they would put it into a lottery to win a huge goodie basket.
“It wasn’t just about being pulled from a hat. Your kiss mark was judged in some way. I put on this red lipstick, kissed the card, and put it in. The next day, I got a phone call to say that I’d won. I thought, I wonder if that’s a sign that I’m going to get the Bond film because this sort of kiss felt very Bond girl. And then I got the Bond job as well. That was a funny coincidence.”
Coincidence or female intuition? The story echoes one of the subtle questions at the heart of Now You See Me: Now You Don’t – have you ever felt something you couldn’t see but knew it was real? The invisible threads that connect moments, people and decisions are central both to the film’s narrative and, Pike suggests, to life itself. Like the lucky kiss at Harrods, the patterns may not always be obvious, but they are there for those willing to notice, to trust, and to follow where they lead.
Photographer: Zoe McConnell
“I can’t go into too many details, but when we were working in Abu Dhabi on the film, I had the same day off as Woody Harrelson [playing one of the illusionists planning the heist]. I went with Woody and his wife, Laura, and we drove to Dubai to visit the Museum of the Future, which felt very appropriate. The night turned into an odyssey. We had this mad adventure that I can’t disclose. While you’re making a magical film and working with someone as magical as Woody, you go and have a mad odyssey into the night.”
In her youth, Pike’s “odyssey” nights, as she likes to call them, were even more memorable, leaving indelible marks that continue to shape her. “I remember going to a play on my own in New York, probably when I was 26. I went to see Ralph Fiennes in Faith Healer, a Brian Friel play. I met a couple in the audience who were from London and they took me backstage. Then they met someone else and said ‘we’re going to this party’. And if you keep an open mind you go. At that party, I met Ali MacGraw, from Love Story. I ended up sitting in a townhouse in New York, aged 26, on a bed with Ali MacGraw, chatting about her life.”
These extraordinary experiences are moments where myth and life converge. They demand trust, openness and a willingness to follow the night’s lessons. The ordinary becomes magical, encounters illuminate new truths and, by embracing the odyssey, we evolve, discover our authenticity and glimpse a version of truth uniquely our own. The mythological becomes personal.
But it’s Pike’s demeanour, her openness and curiosity, that seem to attract moments that feel lifted from a book about magic. “People keep asking me if I’m sad about Inter Alia ending, I’m not. I have so many endings in my life. But I now know that they’re not endings. They’re just connections that you make. They all come round again.”
Or, as they say, what disappears must reappear.
by Adina Ilie
Inter Alia is available to watch in cinemas via NT Live on NTLive.com
NOW YOU SEE ME: NOW YOU DON’T will be in cinemas from 14 November.
Photographer: Zoe McConnell
Fashion Director: Katie Felstead
Beauty Director: Kim Brown using DIOR Capture Le Sérum, DIOR Capture Day Cream and DIOR Forever Skin Perfect Foundation
Hair: Davide Barbieri using ORIBE
Manicurist: Luz Adriana Montoya using DIOR Manicure Collection, DIOR Vernis and DIOR Le Baume
Producer: Joel Gilgallon at Joon
Digi Op: Nick Graham
Photography assistant: Carissa Harrod
Styling assistant: Monty Cooke
Talent: Rosamund Pike
All clothing and accessories DIOR, All beauty DIOR Capture Le Sérum, DIOR Capture Day Cream and DIOR Forever Skin Perfect Foundation