Rosamund Pike says she was asked to ‘unzip and drop’ her dress during James Bond audition

Rosamund Pike has shared that she refused when asked to strip down to her underwear during her James Bond audition.

The Gone Girl star was auditioning for the role of undercover MI6 agent Miranda Frost, alongside Pierce Brosnan as James Bond and Halle Berry as NSA agent Giacinta ‘Jinx’ Johnson, in 2002’s Die Another Day. She went on to play Frost in her first big screen debut.

In a recent interview, Pike said she was asked to unzip her dress at the audition. “In the Bond audition, I was asked to unzip and drop the dress I was wearing, to just stand there in underwear,” Pike told Harper’s Bazaar UK. “And I thought, ‘Well, no, I’ll be doing that if I get the part. I won’t be doing that now.’ I don’t know what possessed me.”

Pike has talked about her audition previously, telling Amazon’s Audible Sessions in 2018 that she didn’t know where she got the resolve to refuse.

“On the day, I don’t know how I got the resolve and strength of mind but I just thought, ‘Actually sod that, if they're gonna see me in my underwear, they better give me the job.’ So I thought, ‘There's no way I'm going to take off a dress in the audition for this tape to be sent around Los Angeles and to be judged on that.’”

Pike, who was 21 at the time, added that she was asked to appear in an evening dress and she turned up in a silk gown once worn by her grandma.

“[The costume designer] said, ‘That’s a very beautiful dress, but in Bond films we wear things a little more like this’, and she held up three pieces of string,” Pike said.

In a podcast interview in April, Pike recounted an incident on the set where she was left “mortified” after a sex scene with Brosnan.

She recounted a scene on a bed “covered in furs” where she “discovered things like nipple covers, and all the taping”. “We have this clinch, and then we separate, and I look at this body tape and the nipple covers and they're covered in hair. And I think, 'Oh my God, I'm waxing Pierce's chest,’” she told David Tennant Does a Podcast With.

“I was so mortified. I thought, ‘Oh my God, he's so brave, and I'm pulling off his chest hair with every embrace.’ And of course, it took a couple of takes to realise it was not him. It was the fake fur of the rugs adorning the swan bed. I literally thought I was waxing the poor man's chest.”

The Independent has reached out to representatives at MGM for comment.