Gone Girl: How Tom Cruise Helped Rosamund Pike With the Movie

Find out what happened when the actress sent her Jack Reacher co-star an emergency email

By Marc Malkin Sep 30, 2014 5:36 PMTags
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Tom Cruise to the rescue!

When Rosamund Pike was freaking out about starting to shoot Gone Girl, she turned to the Hollywood superstar for help.

Pike happened to be suffering from a nasty flu the night before cameras were set to roll on director David Fincher's adaptation of the novel of the same name. She had a 103-degree fever and threw up three times. To make matters even more intense, this would be the first time Pike would be on a movie set on the first day.

"I thought, 'I've got to reach out to somebody who has been in this position,'" Pike, who stars in the thriller opposte Ben Affleck, tells Ramin Setoodeh in the new issue of Variety.

Variety

So she fired off an email to Cruise, her co-star in Jack Reacher. Pike said he wrote her back about his worries when he was an unknown shooting 1981's Taps. "Trust yourself," Cruise told Pike, according to Variety. "You're in the hands of a great director. You're ready."

What she wasn't ready for was being covered in so much fake blood.

"I had so many showers," said Pike, who estimates taking as many as 20 a day. "Your skin becomes raw... I think if David [Fincher] hadn't been worried about animal rights, he would have used pig's blood. It is one of the hardest things to get screen blood to have texture and get it to dry in the correct way." 

Gone Girl premiered Friday at the opening night of the New York Film Festival.

20th Century Fox

And the reviews have been better than stellar.

Variety's awards editor Tim Gray predicts the movie could garner multiple Oscar nominations. "Ben Affleck might be the biggest star in Gone Girl, but it's Pike who will shine bright this awards season," he wrote. "And that's not a knock on Affleck. The actor's at his best in a complex role of widower-turned-suspect in Gone Girl and supporting turns by Tyler Perry, Neil Patrick Harris and Carrie Coon are also worthy of attention."

Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times wrote, "[A]ll the fuss is justified. Superbly cast from the two at the top to the smallest speaking parts, impeccably directed by Fincher and crafted by his regular team to within an inch of its life, Gone Girl shows the remarkable things that can happen when filmmaker and material are this well matched."

Affleck and Pike give "towering performances," Peter Hammond wrote on Deadline Hollywood, adding, "Fincher's direction doesn't make a false move, not only keeping up the 'thriller' end of things but also delivering a smart and wickedly funny look at marriage and the male/female relationship dynamic."

"It's so exciting that everybody is so aware of [the movie]," Pike told me earlier this month at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I've never really been part of a project that has so much tangible awareness. It's very exciting. I just hope that we keep the fans of the book happy right now. That's all I'm focusing on."

We don't think you have anything to worry about, Rosamund.

Gone Girl is in theaters on Oct. 3.