Oxford girl Rosamund Pike on starring in the much-anticipated Gone Girl

Rosamund Pike sits munching from a fruit plate. She’s pregnant with her second child and has a craving for watermelon.

“I’ll gun down any questions that contain spoilers,” she warns.

She’s referring to Gone Girl, the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s bestselling novel, currently showing in Oxfordshire cinemas, in which she stars as Amy Dunne.

The character’s so complicated that even Pike admits it’s hard to talk about her without giving anything away.

Those who’ve read Gone Girl will understand the complexity of Flynn’s breathtaking plot twists, that sweep the rug from right under the reader, undoing everything you thought you knew about the characters.

And in the hands of David Fincher, acclaimed director of Fight Club, Se7en and House Of Cards, the big screen version magnifies every intrigue into shock and awe.

Pike knew the scale of the task she was taking on, when she signed up to the project. “I was really aware, because it had come to me from so many different angles,” explains the 35-year-old, who read English Literature at Wadham College, Oxford.

“I’d heard talk about this book from young girls, men, so many different types of people, and the excitement around it is huge.

“Even now, it seems like Gone Girl was the prototype for a whole new generation of books and characters, and Amy is a prototype for a lot female protagonists.”

Heres what can be told: Amy Dunne’s a rich, high-maintenance housewife, whose marriage to Nick (Ben Affleck) has hit a rough spot. On the day of their fifth anniversary, she goes missing, and Nick becomes the chief suspect in her murder. As the days tick by and their past is slowly revealed, the people around them begin to draw conclusions as to what might have happened, and why.

“Certainly, I’ve never had a challenge like this, and I’ve craved to be stretched in the way this character has stretched me,” says Pike, who while still at Oxford made appearances on TV shows, including A Rather English Marriage and Love in a Cold Climate, a miniseries based on Nancy Mitford’s novels.

Fincher has said that he’d wanted an actress who was an only child to play the role (Pike is the only child of opera singers Caroline and Julian Pike, and travelled around Europe with them before going to boarding school), and someone as determined to get exactly what they want for themselves as Amy.

As part of the audition process, he and Pike would have long, deep conversations over Skype, talking graphically about sexual harassment, rape and other dark subjects that arise in story.

“When we first met, he probably wanted to see whether I had the guts to go there,” she says. “Or whether I was some sort of precious little English flower who didn’t want to get my hands dirty. Which of course, is not the case at all.”

Pike has not always simply played the English rose.

Her breakthrough role came in 2002 as Bond girl Miranda Frost in Die Another Day. She’s had comedy roles in Johnny English Reborn and The World’s End, and was brilliant as a ditzy socialite in An Education.

But she admits she started wanting to be more than just the sidekick.

Gone Girl is produced by Reese Witherspoon; the Oscar-winning actress who admitted that even she got fed up with not being sent any decent roles, so started her own production company.

Rosamund Pike with Ben Affleck in Gone Girl

“I got an email form Reese the other day,” Pike says. “Her film, Wild, is getting tremendous acclaim, and she just said how damn lucky we are.

“These roles, like Amy and her character in Wild, don’t come along very often. She’s very humble about it, but she optioned both books. She had the foresight and the appetite to go and seek out those roles.”

Pike is following suit.

“People are very inclined to ask you to do what you’ve done before, and keep you in your little box. I’ve started to think, ‘How do we keep women as complicated and interesting?’ They don’t all have to be fragile, and they don’t have to be motherly and delicate and admirable all the time.”

Not that she’s averse to playing mothers, however, she also stars in the recently released What We Did On Our Holiday, with Billy Connolly and David Tennant, as mum-of-three, Abi.

“I remember distinctly, moments earlier on in my career where I had to do it [play a mother], and I’d meet this little child and he’d look at me very suspiciously as if to say, ‘No, you couldn’t be my mother’,” says the actress, who already has a two-year-old son, Solo, with boyfriend Robie Uniacke. “Now, they just look and say, ‘Of course you can be my mother’, and it’s really nice."

She may have found contentment, but Pike’s had her share of heartbreak played out in the media.

With Billy Connolly in What We Did On Our Holiday

She was engaged to director Joe Wright, who she met when he directed her in Pride & Prejudice (Pike played demure Jane Bennet), but he dumped her abruptly just before the wedding, with reports at the time claiming he hadn’t liked the invitations she’d sent out.

Today, Pike is careful with her answers, and offers just enough without giving too much of herself away. Just like Amy, she knows her part to play.

One of the major themes Gone Girl explores is the characters we all play, the people we become for those around us – our friends, our colleagues, our spouse. How close are they to who we really are?

“That’s what was really interesting about delving into the world of Gone Girl,” says Pike.

“That Gillian is pointing to this moment in our culture, in our rather narcissistic culture: we’re trained to do it.

“Think about how many people are meeting their partners online; that’s all about setting a profile that improves upon your life, that edits it favourably and gives an illusion of who you are.

“So expectations are unrealistically high, and at a certain point in a relationship, you realise the person you met is not the person they really are, because they were performing a version of themselves.”

FROM PAGE TO SCREEN: UPCOMING ADAPTATIONS

* The Best Of Me. Tissues at the ready, as yet another Nicholas The Notebook Sparks’ novel is due to hit the big screen in mid October, with X-Men’s James Marsden in the good-looking leading male role.

* Love, Rosie. Following the success of PS I Love You, Cecelia Ahern’s Love, Rosie has now been given the big screen treatment. Starring rising star Lily Collins and The Hunger Games’ Sam Claflin, it’s due to hit screen in late October.

* The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, Part 1. November sees the release of he third instalment of this popular book-to-screen series, with Jennifer Lawrence returning as heroine Katniss Everdeen.

* Paddington. Everyone’s favourite marmalade-loving bear also makes his big screen debut in November, with Hollywood’s Nicole Kidman as the villainous Millicent.

* The Hobbit: The Battle Of The Five Armies. Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch return in the third Hobbit movie, due out in December, based on the fantasy novels by JRR Tolkien.

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