Rosamund Pike is so good at playing bad. Her work as Amy Dunne in David Fincher’s Gone Girl scored her a nomination for Best Actress and now she’s getting more awards season love for playing the duplicitous Marla Grayson in J Blakeson’s I Care a Lot on Netflix. Marla appears to, well, care a lot while working as a court-appointed guardian for folks in need when really, Marla is busy abusing the system behind the scenes. Marla targets elderly individuals to put in care facilities, whether they need to be there or not, so that she can take control of their assets.
It’s a mighty disturbing and deplorable hustle, but somehow, Blakeson and Pike keep you fully invested in Marla’s fight for a big payday and survival when she targets the wrong ward, Dianne Wiest’s Jennifer Peterson who has ties to a mobster (Peter Dinklage).
How exactly do Blakeson and Pike manage to achieve that without ever sugar-coating the fact that Marla is doing something terrible herself? Here’s how Pike put it when discussing the movie for its February 19th release:
“One of the things about a character who’s very unlikeable who keeps you on side is the fact that she’s not asking anything of you. She’s not asking you to like her. She’s not asking you to feel for her. She’s not suddenly halfway through the movie delivering you a tragic backstory and saying, ‘Well, this is why I’m like how I am.’ I think those are the kind of moves that derail a character like this, and it’s something I really admire in the screenplay for not doing. I think the other thing is that, as well as sort of realizing how shocking Marla is, we are also simultaneously shocked with the whole system that is set up for people like her to win. The only reason Marla can have this hustle is because there’s a loophole in the American legal and healthcare system that allows her to do this. She’s not breaking the law. She’s stretching it as thin as a piece of sticky tack can go, but she’s not breaking the law.”
While the same certainly can’t be said for Amy Dunne as far as breaking the law goes, Pike was able to find some similarities in the two anti-heroes:
“I’ve thought about Amy now that I’ve seen the film. I didn’t think about Amy while I was making the film. What they both do, those characters, is take traditional notions of femininity, the things that people expect in their women, the qualities, and use them to their advantage. Mimic them, portray them very convincingly. Amy it’s sort of making herself the tragic victim for the whole of American and you think she is the victim until you realize she’s controlling the whole story. And with Marla, she’s very convincing in court. She appears trustworthy, an upstanding citizen, has the interest of the people at heart. She’s responsible, reliable. She’s a caretaker, a caregiver. And then you realize she’s none of those things. She’s just using these people for everything she can get out of them. But she’s convincing at roleplaying, and I think I enjoy taking all those parts of being a woman and sort of using and abusing them. It’s an interesting and unsettling place to play in as an actor.”
You can catch our full conversation in the video at the top of this article to hear more from Pike on her experience making I Care a Lot. The movie is now available to watch on Netflix and I can’t recommend it enough, but if you need a little more convincing, do check out Matt Goldberg’s review of the film from the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival.