Rosamund Pike on Her New Thriller: “Adrenaline Courses Through You”

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Hallow Road, 2025
Hallow Road, 2025(Film still)

As Hallow Road is released, Rosamund Pike and co-star Matthew Rhys talk about terrifying car scenes, and the “arsehole” who told Pike she couldn’t do Shakespeare

“I could write quite an interesting article on the car scenes that I’ve done,” says Rosamund Pike, a 46-year-old English actor who’s not a journalist but knows how to deliver killer quotes that work in print. “This includes being nearly drowned in I Care a Lot – having to escape from a sinking car, in a [water] tank. Now I think about it, it gives me the heebie-jeebies.” She visibly shudders. “Two days underwater! They sank the whole car so it filled up with water. I had to take that last bit of …” – she dramatically inhales – “… air.”

“That’s terrifying,” says Matthew Rhys, her co-star in Hallow Road, a claustrophobic thriller from director Babak Anvari set almost entirely inside a car. “What if something went wrong?” “I had a team of divers and a scuba thing,” Pike continues. “But the moment we turned over, I had to lose the mask and go as long as I could. I was trapped, with the seatbelt locked in. I had to get the headrest off the car, swim to the backseat, kick out the back window, and swim up from the bottom of a quarry.” She laughs at the audacity. “When it’s made to feel real, your adrenaline courses through you, and your heart races faster and faster. That certainly happened during Hallow Road when we did those long takes. Your nervous system takes over.”

I’m at Universal’s London offices in April, sat across a table from Pike and Rhys, the duo only visible to me from the waist up. It is, then, similar to what the viewer sees of the two actors in Hallow Road. Directed by Anvari from a script by William Gillies, the film starts off in 16mm inside a middle-class home belonging to a couple, Maddie (Pike) and Frank (Rhys), who sleep in separate rooms. After the pair learn that their daughter, Alice (Megan McDonnell, in voice only), was responsible for a hit-and-run accident, they speed off in their Land Rover to fix the problem. Maddie, a paramedic reliant on antidepressants, tries to coach Alice on rescuing the victim, while Frank volunteers to take the blame and go to prison instead of his daughter.

Today, Pike and Rhys are in a chatty, playful mood. They start off too formal (“Hi, my name is Rosamund Pike”), but soon repeatedly break down into giggles, with Rhys at one point singing an answer for reasons known only to himself. They take particular delight in sharing unusual details about the production. “One day, Babak said we were going to shoot the film in one take, so that the crew, and the people doing the traffic lights, could get familiar with the subject matter,” says Pike. “The film carries you. The tough thing is when you have a particular moment, and you haven’t had the revving-up, and you have to find the emotional state of terror when the two parents believe someone else is going to reach their daughter before them.”

Pike, who starred in Gone Girl and battled James Bond in Die Another Day, is already adept at thrillers, while Rhys led six seasons of the spy series The Americans. They’ve both done their 10,000 hours in terms of car scenes. “I was driving through London recently on a low-loader [for a film], and the temptation is to do way more looking around than you would ever do,” says Pike, turning to Rhys. “You’ve probably seen actors look crap, doing too much looking around?”

Inside the car, Anvari switches from celluloid to digital, deploying tricks such as exaggerated traffic lights that paint the frame green and red, the latter giving the impression that they’re cruising into hell. The actors performed the scenes on a volume stage, meaning that LED screens around them played roadside footage captured by Anvari and his cinematographer on their own 3am drive. “There’s great pressure on us to deliver pace, tension and suspense,” says Rhys. “That should come from the performance. Maybe in my own delusional way, I was also going, ‘Babak will do that in the edit. I’ll sit here and do the best I can.’”

Anvari is the 43-year-old British-Iranian director of Under the ShadowsWounds and I Came By, all three of which are thrillers with memorable car scenes. “The film starts off in a Cassavetes style,” Anvari tells me over Zoom. “But as we go deeper into the anxious psyche of these parents, the film becomes more expressionistic, both visually and sound design-wise.” He acknowledges that volume stages are typically used for genre fare like The Mandalorian, not indie features replicating night-time streets. “By taking a car into a studio, dismantling it, and having that become the stage, I knew I could do more cinematic stuff. Taking the technology from superhero movies to do an intimate, psychological thriller – why not?”

The volume stage’s LED screens also lend a hypnotic quality to the landscapes visible through the car windows. Case in point: the third act threatens to turn into a different kind of nightmare, and the enigmatic finale feels designed to spark debates among cinemagoers. I ask Anvari if he and the actors all agree on what happens at the end. “I know what I was after,” says Anvari. “Rosamund and Matthew sometimes changed their mind. It’s up to you to interpret whether it’s a psychological study of two panicked parents, or a tale with a supernatural element. It’s almost interactive: the audience has to fill in the gaps.”

Pike and Rhys have already discussed whether Hallow Road could exist as a two-person stage play. Pike theorises that they could switch roles from night to night, or toss a coin at the start, just like Juliet Stevenson and Lia Williams did on their 2016 production of Mary Stuart. Besides, they rehearsed the script like a play: Rhys visited Pike’s house in Prague for read-throughs; Pike’s family eavesdropped and helped with supporting roles. “We had so much learning to do,” says Pike. “My son listened to it all.”

Do you need to be a parent to play a parent? “No,” says Pike, adamantly. “You can have an imagination. Someone once told me I couldn’t play Juliet because I’d never been in love. I was really disturbed by that. I thought, ‘That’s not true, because Juliet’s never been in love, either. It’s the first time – arsehole.’ People do that to psych you out. ‘You can’t do this because you’ve never lived it.’ Loads of film history would never have been made if people only did things they’d lived.”

“Yeah, it’s bollocks,” adds Rhys. “Can I not do Macbeth because I haven’t been a king of Scotland?” I meekly offer to retract my question. “No, no!” says Pike. “We’re only being facetious. It’ll amplify anything, but I wouldn’t want to deny any actor from playing a parental role if they don’t have children. In fact, you’re not thinking about your own children. For me, in acting, everything has to become real for you as the character. The fact I have my own two sons is irrelevant, because my daughter is [the character] Alice.” Pike thinks about it, then admits, “It might have driven my curiosity towards the project. As a parent, you want to step in and make the ride easier for your children, [to] take away the friction – but you can’t, really. You probably shouldn’t.” Rhys, a father himself, adds, “It’s how they learn.”

Hallow Road is out now in UK cinemas now. 

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