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.
