Rosamund Pike stood on business when she auditioned for the James Bond franchise.
In a new interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK, the 46-year-old actress recalled her uncomfortable tryout for the 2002 film “Die Another Day.”
“In the Bond audition, I was asked to unzip and drop the dress I was wearing, to just stand there in underwear,” Pike said. “And I thought, ‘Well, no, I’ll be doing that if I get the part. I won’t be doing that now.’”
Pike confirmed that she refused to strip in the audition.
“I don’t know what possessed me,” she said.
Despite that, Pike landed the role as Miranda Frost in the action flick starring Pierce Brosnan.
Pike’s character is a Harvard graduate and Olympic fencer who appears to be a member of MI6, when in actuality she’s a double agent. She’s killed by another Bond girl, Halle Berry’s Jinx Johnson.
Last month, Pike appeared on “David Tennant Does a Podcast With …” and opened up about a moment during a love scene between herself and Brosnan, 71, in “Die Another Day” that she said left her “mortified.”
“I think, ‘Oh my God, I’m waxing Pierce’s chest,’” she recalled. “I was so mortified. I thought, ‘Oh my God, he’s so brave, and I’m pulling off his chest hair with every embrace.’”
But Pike said that after “a couple of takes” she realized she wasn’t accidentally waxing her co-star’s chest, but rather “the fake fur of the rugs” on the bed they were filming on.
Pike starred in the 20th James Bond movie.
The franchise, which was officially taken over by Amazon MGM Studios in February, is currently on the hunt for a new actor to take on the Bond mantle.
At the Cannes Film Festival on Tuesday, Berry, 58, told Variety that doesn’t know if the next 007 “should be a woman.”
When asked if she’d do a spinoff of Jinx, she said, “There was a time that that could have happened. Probably should have happened. I would have loved for that to happen.”
Helen Mirren, who has never starred in a James Bond movie, blasted the franchise for “profound sexism” in an interview with the Standard in March.
“The whole series of James Bond, it was not my thing,” the British actress, 79, said. “It really wasn’t. I never liked James Bond. I never liked the way women were in James Bond.”
But like Berry, Mirren said she’s opposed to a female 007.
