When I meet Rosamund Pike on a balmy spring day, she is the picture of cool control in a neat black top and an elegant pleated skirt. But the actor, now 47, has a long history of upending any expectations her composed demeanor might suggest, and she quickly reveals a more playful, anarchic side. When I ask who makes her skirt, she wastes no time in twisting it around to check the label. Later, she’s entertained by a mouse running along the baseboard of one of London’s more elegant restaurants. “Oh look!” she says, amused, tilting her head to get a better view.
It’s this mix of stateliness and spontaneity, humor and emotional acuity that is on display in one of her best performances yet, as the lead of Suzie Miller’s legal drama Inter Alia, set to arrive on Broadway this November after its London run. The play is the second in Miller’s planned legal trilogy, which began with Prima Facie, a coruscating examination of the justice system starring Jodie Comer as a criminal-defense lawyer. (Prima Facie also moved from London to New York, in 2023.) The new play is similarly a work of big ideas, but it is also an intimate and personal drama with which many women can empathize.
In Inter Alia, Pike plays Crown Court Judge Jessica Parks—esteemed justice, wife, mother, and professional multitasker. The wide-ranging performance won her an Olivier when the play opened in London. One moment, Parks is drunk in the back of a taxi after a night out, the next she is walloped by emotional devastation when her son is accused of precisely the kind of crime she usually condemns. The “inter alia”—literally “among other things”—refers to the competing demands around which Parks’s life plays out.
Although Parks’s husband, played by the English actor Jamie Glover, and son, the young actor Cormac McAlinden, appear briefly, it is Pike’s show; she never leaves the stage from the moment she emerges—like a rock star, rising through a trap door. It’s been 14 years since Pike last appeared onstage, but the return is something of a homecoming. “It was just always where I felt I belonged,” she says, smiling—much more than the James Bond film Die Another Day that first made her famous back when she was just 22. “Being on the whole Bond jamboree was extraordinary, like a magic carpet had arrived.” But the first-class flights, the five-star hotels—none of it felt natural to her. “When that was all over, I remember being on the bus, going to rehearse at the Royal Court Theatre, and thinking, This is who I really am.”
