If you've seen Gone Girl, you'll know that Rosamund Pike plays a character who isn't quite what that she seems. Halfway through the movie, it turns out that Amy Dunne, the definitively cool wife of Ben Affleck's bar-owning husband, has framed him for murder because he's been having an affair with the gorgeous girl from the Blurred Lines video. In one of the film's most memorable scenes, Amy murders her former friend, Desi Collings (played by Neil Patrick Harris), using a box cutter. And in order to understand what doing that in real life might feel like, Pike wandered into a butcher's shop and asked whether it would be all right for her to take a box cutter to a pig carcass. In her own words:
"I had no idea how much force you needed to slice someones throat. I actually went to a butcher and asked them if they wouldnt mind me just using a box cutter on a pig carcass, just to understand what it would be like. 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.
Was that really necessary, Rosamund Pike? Did you really need to go out of your way to locate a pig carcass so you could stab it repeatedly with a box cutter? Strange girl.
Sam Hill is an ardent cinephile and has been writing about film professionally since 2008. He harbours a particular fondness for western and sci-fi movies.