By Karl Rozemeyer

Rosamund Pike confidently asserts that she recognises my voice. It has been many years since I interviewed her in person in a Manhattan hotel. I suggest that maybe she recollects my Southern African accent. She demurs, speaking over the phone from Paris. “No. I don’t know. It’s the quality,” she says. “Anyway, it’s nice to talk to you again.”

Pike is one of those rare actors that pays close attention to the details. It is evident in her focus on capturing voice cadences, speech patterns and other idiosyncratic nuances of character. And it is evident in the research she conducts prior to each role she plays. Her mindfulness of detail is perhaps most pronounced when she delves into biographical roles, allowing for direct comparisons of her portrayals with footage and photographs of her subjects. To portray Ruth Khama, the British-born wife of Seretse Khama, the first president of a newly independent Botswana, in A United Kingdom (2016), Pike buried herself in the British Library, pouring over newspaper reports from the 1950s that sensationalised the couple’s relationship. And when Pike took on the role of legendary Sunday Times war reporter Marie Colvin in A Private War (2018), she reportedly wrapped her arms in gaffer tape to capture Colvin’s angular movements.

Now Pike portrays another historical figure of strength and perseverance in Radioactive. While the film focuses on the life of pioneering Polish-born scientist Marie Curie – who along with her husband Pierre, discovered the elements radium and polonium and who earned two Nobel prizes for her scientific work – Radioactive also explores the impact of her discoveries on 20th century medicine, nuclear energy and weaponry. “It is not trying to be a comprehensive biography of Marie Curie,” Pike notes. “It is a biography of radioactivity, the discovery, the people surrounding it and the fallout from it.”

Pike broke into the mainstream in 2014 with her lead performance as the duplicitous Amy Dunne opposite Ben Affleck in David Fincher’s thriller Gone Girl, based on Gillian Flynn’s bestseller. The role earned Pike an Academy Award nomination and catapulted her onto Hollywood’s A-list. Rather than capitalise on the limelight afforded by the success of Gone Girl and pursue lead roles in high octane action or superhero movies, Pike has since been both judicious and assiduous in her project selections.

Recently, in Scott Cooper’s Western Hostiles (2017), Pike played a headstrong widow who accompanies an army captain tasked with escorting a Cheyenne chief and his family through perilous territory, and in 7 Days in Entebbe (2018) she took on the role of a pro-Palestinian German revolutionary who, along with a small team of hijackers, diverts an Air France flight bound for Paris to Uganda. Last year, she completed State of the Union, an offbeat comedy series written by Nick Hornby, and she is currently working on the series Wheel of Time, an Amazon vehicle based on fourteen epic fantasy novels by Robert Jordan, in which she acts and has a producer role.

“I think sometimes characters find you,” Pike muses. “With Radioactive, she found me in a way.”

Having read the script of Radioactive, Pike took science lessons and worked with a chemist in order to understand the work that consumed Madame Curie’s life. She also began reading books and biographies about the Curies. “Marie Curie was obviously a very strong person,” Pike observes. “She was a terribly dedicated person at the cost of other things. She was not maternal. She was not warm and fuzzy. We love her eccentric kind of brash charm. We found her direct, abrupt manner very endearing and I think it is something that (her husband) Pierre found endearing.”

But, as Pike points out, Madame Curie also had a lot of trauma in her life. Pierre, played in the film by Sam Riley, was struck and killed by a horse-drawn cart in 1906.

“It was very traumatic – the loss of Pierre,” Pike says. “She was a deeply troubled soul after that. She kept the most beautiful grief diary which came to light in 2017, just before we started filming, which is one of the most moving documents and describes the depth of her love, her capacity for love and her total adoration for this man and this face that she would never tire of looking at.”

Contemplating Pierre Curie’s death, Pike pauses to quote a line from a Rupert Brooke poem. “OH! Death will find me, long before I tire/ Of watching you.” And adds: “Wow, this is this woman’s truth! Of course, in her life she was exacting and formidable, a very formidable presence, both as a teacher and as a scientist. But, you know, underneath it, that was her soft spot – the love she felt for that man… Some stories have a power that’s inherent and there was something about their marriage and their love that we really respected.”

Pierre Curie was remarkable in his time, in that he argued for Marie to be granted the same praise and accolades from the scientific community that he enjoyed. “Pierre Curie is in some ways more of a feminist than Marie Curie, because I think she just lived equality like it was her right,” Pike notes. “He fought for her recognition as equal to him more than she did, in a way. He saw that women were generally underappreciated or less appreciated than men and when the first nomination for the Nobel Prize came out, only his name was mentioned and so he fought to get her name alongside his. And, of course, it had to be because it was their mutual discovery and it was her initial work that’d led to it.”

While promoting the film, Pike was surprised to encounter sexism voiced regarding her portrayal of Marie Curie. The actor recalls a journalist who posed the question: “Why, after all her success, is she still kind of a bitch?” Pike was taken aback. “I was really shocked by the question,” she recalls. “I said: That’s really interesting. It says more about you than it does about Marie Curie. Because I think what you’re reading as ‘a bitch’ is just drive, intelligence, directness, honesty, ambition, forthrightness, all qualities if exhibited by a man would be [interpreted as]: “Well, he’s a cool guy.” And I was just surprised because to me she’s not a bitch. She’s exacting and demanding. But exciting for those very reasons.”

After Pierre’s sudden death, Marie Curie began an affair with Paul Langevin, a fellow scientist who had worked alongside her former husband. The affair did not last but when it became public, the ensuing scandal had a damaging effect on Marie Curie’s reputation. “And for a long time when we were shooting, I wasn’t really ready for her to have a relationship with Paul Langevin,” Pike recalls with a short laugh. “That section of the film I didn’t really understand. I felt I was living inside this incredible marriage that she shared with Pierre and I couldn’t really understand why this student (Langevin) was captivating to her. And then, of course, I realised it in a blinding shock. It wasn’t about him. It was about the fact that he was the one person who understood what she had lost because he was the one person that had been as close to Pierre in work as she had. And then it made total sense to me.”

Radioactive weaves together many aspects of Marie Curie’s life and thought lines about her work. Pike references some that intersect toward the film’s conclusion, including the “thread of a hospital running through it, her fear of hospitals, her fear that she could never save her mother when her mother died of tuberculosis” as well as the “brief moment where they thought radium could cure cancer or there was a possibility that it could shrink a tumor.” The film also references “the anxiety about the safety of her work” that worried Marie Curie. It also, more optimistically, touches on the fact that it was “her daughter who developed artificial radiation which is what we now use in radiotherapy.”

For envisaging and connecting the film’s viewpoints and storylines, Pike praises Marjane Satrapi, the film’s director. “Well, I think it’s something very poetical and magical, our film, because of Marjane’s vision. With Marie Curie, sometimes you feel she is fighting the world, sometimes it’s perfection, or the press. One is just carried on the wing of learning about this woman and going on a ride with her.”

Radioactive is in cinemas on November 5, 2020