If you’ve seen Anthropoid, you’ll be well-versed in the assassination of Nazi bigwig Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942. Another movie tackling the subject from a whole different angle is Cédric Jimenez’s HHhH, starring Jason Clarke and Jack O’Connell as the pair of Czech assassins and Rosamund Pike as Heydrich’s better half. Well, less evil half.
“It’s a very interesting and unusual structure” explains Pike of the adaptation of Laurent Binet’s novel. “It starts out with [Heydrich] as a young naval officer, who is shamed and kicked out of the navy for a sexual misdemeanour just while he’s meeting the woman who ends up becoming his wife. You watch this man become the master of death that he was in designing and executing the Final Solution."
Rather than an Anthropoid-like thriller about the lead-up to and aftermath of his killing, then, HHhH has a much longer arc with elements of twisted psychodrama. “I play his wife Lina, who is a fascinating character,” continues Pike, “because she believed ardently in the Nazi Party and she was incredibly attracted to the thing in him that was disturbed and helped set his course.”
She's Nazi Lady Macbeth, then? “Maybe, slightly. And then we cut back to the assassination attempt and the training of the Czech freedom fighters. As an acting challenge, it’s incredibly interesting to play someone whose politics are reprehensible but to not judge the character.”
Pike appears next on our screens in romantic drama A United Kingdom, which opens the BFI London Film Festival on 5 October before going out nationwide on 25 November.