Every now and then, there’s that gig you sign up for that seems like the biggest challenge of your life. For actor Rosamund Pike, one such moment kicked off her career with an impressive bang, as her role in the 20th James Bond film, Die Another Day, served as her introduction, for better or for worse, to the world of movies. Pike’s performance as Miranda Frost is made all the more remarkable when you take into account the fact that, as she explains below, she was totally in the dark about the world of Bond:
Everything was new to me — everything. There’s so much mythology around the Bond films, there’s so much riding on it, so much attention on it, there’s so many eyes on it — I didn’t really understand any of that.
In this admission to EW, Rosamund Pike has probably just given the world the biggest clue to how her feature film debut in Die Another Day still stands as one of the pieces to that particular movie that stands up to the rigors of time.
A controversially campy movie even in its own day, Pierce Brosnan’s final entry in his tenure as 007 has taken a fair amount of stick in the almost two decades that have succeeded its release in November 2002. But included among James Bond’s CGI glacier surfing and another impressive performance from Halle Berry as fellow Bond Woman Jinx, is Pike’s icy portrayal of a woman with a secret.
Spoilers for you readers who haven’t seen Die Another Day, but Rosamund Pike’s Miranda Frost was the bad Bond Woman of the picture. Introduced as a double agent working for MI6, Frost was secretly in league with Toby Stephens’ villain Gustav Graves the entire time. Which make her remarks pretty amazing as, with that lack of knowledge surrounding the James Bond tradition, Pike was allowed to forge her own path with Miranda’s character. The result was a villain that could stand toe to toe against James Bond, baiting the trap with expert precision.
Sometimes, going into an enterprise like the James Bond series without foreknowledge is a blessing. It certainly looks that way for Rosamund Pike, as even compared to the newer era of Bond Women that have graced the screen, her Die Another Day character holds up extremely well. One could even say that with her experience as the secretly villainous Miranda under her belt early on, Rosamund Pike’s eventual casting as Amy Dunne in David Fincher’s adaptation of Gone Girl was something that was always fated to happen.
Rosamund Pike can be currently be seen in the Amazon Original movie Radioactive, which is now available for streaming on Prime Video.
