Rosamund Pike Did Something Beyond Nasty For Her Gone Girl Role
Generally speaking, when you sit down to watch a David Fincher film, you can expect to be shocked by at least one instance of brutal violence or gruesome bloodshed. From "Se7en" to "Zodiac," these kinds of scenes have become a staple of the director's filmography, and "Gone Girl" is, of course, no exception.
While the movie mostly unfolds as a crime thriller mystery, there is one particularly notable bit of nastiness in "Gone Girl." Anybody who has seen the film likely remembers the moment that Amy (Rosamund Pike) slits Desi's (Neil Patrick Harris) throat in the middle of intercourse and is sprayed profusely with his blood.
Well, just in case that image isn't seared enough into your brain, Pike herself shared some behind-the-scenes details of her performance during a Q&A at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival (via Collider) concerning how she prepared for the infamous "Gone Girl" scene. "I actually went to a butcher and asked them if they wouldn't mind me just using a box cutter on a pig carcass, just to understand what it would be like," she revealed.
Though it's not out of the ordinary for performers to consult with experts on how something might look or feel in real life, this one takes trying to be accurate to a whole new level.
Fans in the butcher shop could have spotted Pike behind the counter
While detailing her research at the butcher's shop, Rosamund Pike said, "They let me do it, so anyone buying meat that day would have seen me behind the counter, with serious intent, finding out the mechanics of doing that. That was purely for research purposes." Even in a world where actors like Tom Cruise put their lives in danger regularly to complete their own stunts and special effects teams go above and beyond to make sure that scenes of disgusting body horror come off as realistic as possible, the lengths that Pike went to in order to make sure her "Gone Girl" scene looked convincing are a bit shocking.
Still, the actor had her reasons for wanting to go to such extreme lengths to get it right. "I always get worried about anything physical, like the action sequences. Neil Patrick Harris and I had to do a violent scene," Pike recalled. "If you're going to do something like that, you have to do it with a certain degree of accuracy. I had no idea how much force you needed to slice someone's throat."
Regardless of how viewers might feel about the strategy that the performer used to make sure she got the upsetting scene just right, you can't argue with the results. The scene remains one of the most memorable from "Gone Girl" and will likely remain one of Pike's most famous scenes for the rest of her career.