Rosamund Pike compares her cunning antiheroines in I Care a Lot and Gone Girl

Rosamund Pike knows the comparisons between her characters in I Care a Lot and Gone Girl are inevitable, and she welcomes them.

In the former film, which dropped Friday on Netflix, the British actress plays Marla Grayson, a vicious and cunning legal conservator who runs a lucrative scam on elderly clients with her partner, Fran (Eiza Gonzalez). In Gone Girl, she played Amy Dunne, a ruthless scorned wife who sets up her own murder and frames her cheating husband.

For anyone who's seen the two films, the parallels between the scheming ladies are evident, and Pike says she loved getting back to this sort of role. "I certainly enjoyed returning to the stage where I can enjoy darkly and sort of satirically shocking people, I suppose," she tells EW. "I do think they would be two interesting women to get in a room together. I don't think they would like each other very much at all."

For Pike, the characters first and foremost share their smarts. "I think intelligence is very sexy and seductive, even if it's intelligence used to a bad end, as we discovered with Amy Dunne too," she says of her Gone Girl role.

There are of course key differences in their methodologies. Amy is "a different kind of planner," Pike says. "Amy is very strategic and has everything worked out months in advance, with every 't' crossed and every 'i' dotted, and Marla is more of a hustler. She flies by the seat of her pants a bit more, and she kind of is a grittier creature, really. She can get caught between a rock and a hard place and somehow find the opening and get out. Amy is a different type of person, but they are both very intelligent and good at duping innocent people."

As with Amy, Pike says Marla was a character she knew she could sink her teeth into and take audiences on a wild ride with. "I think it's a very conflicting place to lead an audience," she muses. "It's always very attractive to watch somebody who's very good at something, and Marla is very, very good at her hustle. It just happens that it's a hustle that we can't really approve of, and yet we find it really fun to watch, which makes us kind of not sure quite where our sort of ethics or moral compunction has gone."

When Gone Girl, which was adapted from the best-selling Gillian Flynn novel, hit theaters in 2014, it was a smashing critical and commercial success, grossing $369 million on a budget of $61 million. It was also a major moment for Pike, earning her a slew of nominations for Best Actress, including at the Oscars, BAFTAs, Golden Globes, and SAG Awards. She hopes that her new film will compare to her previous one in one final way. "Gone Girl was probably the most significant film I've been part of where I knew that adults wanted to see that film in the theater, and they wanted to see it right when it came out, and it was a talking point," she says. "If [I Care a Lot] became a film that caught the public's imagination like that, that would be wonderful."

Related content:

• Read EW's review of I Care a Lot
• Rosamund Pike on playing a shameless schemer in I Care a Lot: 'I wasn't trying to win any admirers'
• From Bond girl to Gone Girl, Rosamund Pike on her most memorable roles