The Other Woman In ‘Gone Girl’ Is Far From Gone: Up and Coming Emily Ratajkowski

The other woman, the one we love to hate. She’s younger, pretty, maybe free of major responsibilities. She’s what we all wish we were, maybe who we were a decade or two decades ago. In Gone Girl, that other woman is the brunette Emily Ratajkowski, who plays the 23 year old girlfriend of the suspected killer, played by Ben Affleck.

A filmmaker might have hired any random beauty to play Andie, the college-student girlfriend of Affleck’s character, but director David Fincher had an eye for talent and took a chance on Emily Ratajkowski, whose most notorious past onscreen experience involved dancing nearly naked in Robin Thicke’s controversial “Blurred Lines” video. Since she’s only in a few scenes in the film, Andie might have come off as some random beauty Nick sleeps with and tries to hide from his wife, Amy (Rosamund Pike). Yet Ratajkowski gives her both intelligence and innocence, so we see Andie as Nick’s girlfriend and a believable alternative to Amy, not just a clichéd mistress.

She’s not just a pretty face, either. When asked about how she felt about the role, her answer was insightful and lucid in an interview with Red Eye.

“I think the thing that was really hard about it, especially as someone who had read the book without considering that it’s not such a big part, is her role in the film is really specific. It’s this big reveal, you find out that he hasn’t been a faithful husband, that he hasn’t been loving his wife, and that also his wife knows and of course she’s pissed. So she was sort of a little bit one-dimensional I think, so it’s really fun for me to imagine what that feels like. It’s not that hard to imagine being a young, vulnerable girl [laughs], who has a crush on someone else and maybe it’s come to a point where now it’s reciprocal and [developing] a relationship. So I guess that was really important to me was to imagine what her novel would look like.”

Known for her famous bikini and lingerie shots, it’s not hard to imagine that brains plus beauty equals a bombshell that will have much more success. Already, 2015 is shaping up to be great year for Emily, with her being cast in Entourage The Movie and We Are Your Friends. She has also landed the cover spot on the February 2015 issue of FHM.

Emily says that knowing yourself is the key to any relationship, be it with another person or with a career.

“To me, the most interesting thing isn’t about the relationship you have with another person but instead the relationship you have within yourself that draws you to someone specifically.”

Something within her has certainly drawn many to her, and we should expect to see a lot more of her in the future.