With Academy Award, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild nominations under her belt, not to mention Golden Globe and Prime-time Emmy wins, Rosamund Pike has proven herself as an immensely talented dramatic actress at least ten times over, but she’s hardly averse to the odd spot of broad genre fare, either.
In fact, she can currently be seen taking top billing in Amazon’s fantasy series The Wheel of Time, which scored the streaming service’s most-watched premiere of the year. On top of that, she also made her feature film debut in James Bond blockbuster Die Another Day, video game adaptation Doom, Tom Cruise’s Jack Reacher, epic fantasy Wrath of the Titans.
However, Pike revealed in an interview with Collider that in order to land a role in Wrath of the Titans, she was forced to turn down Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, and she explains why she made the decision.
“I think I was very interested in the way that the director was approaching Wrath of the Titans. He was a South African guy called Jonathan Liebesman and he just had this sort of documentary approach to this big world and I thought he’d teach me stuff. You know, sometimes you pick roles based on what you think you can learn from them, and I thought there were things that I would learn from that, which I did, whether or not anyone knew about it. He taught me an awful lot about action, actually.”
While Pike doesn’t mention the specific gig she’s have landed in Man of Steel, an educated guess would have been General Zod’s lieutenant Faora. That would have resulted in much less screen time, and given that she ended up as one of the leads in the near half-billion-dollar hit Wrath of the Titans, it turned out to be the right call on her part.
