Rosamund Pike: I used to feel like I was being ‘eaten alive’ on red carpets

The Gone Girl actress has developed a coping mechanism to deal with intense events 
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Rachel McGrath23 June 2020
The Weekender

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Rosamund Pike has said that she used to feel like she was being “eaten alive” at red carpet events.

The British actress, 41, said she had trained herself to create a “shell” when she attended film premieres and promotional photocalls as a young woman.

She said Pierce Brosnan had helped her overcome her fear when they starred alongside each other in the 2002 James Bond film Die Another Day.

She told the PA news agency: “I’ve trained myself. When I was younger I found the same sort of scrutiny just unbearable. Now I’ve found a strategy and I can do it. At first you feel like you’re being eaten alive."

First time: Pike at her first ever photocall, alongside Brosnan and Halle Berry, in 2002

Revealing that Brosnan warned her how intense events could be, she said of their 2002 photocall: "I could hear this noise of people and he said ‘Just wait, around the corner they’re there ready to eat you alive’ or something – he didn’t actually say that, but that’s what I heard.

“And then we went up on the stage and I nearly fell over, it was so… The force of these people, the photographers, the flashbulbs.

“He just put his arm around me, and I thought: ‘God, he realises I’m about to fall over.’

“And he just had me. Because it is a shock, it feels like you are being eaten alive for a minute. And then you start to realise that you can put up a shell.”

James Bond in London: where the films were shot

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Since making her film debut in Die Another Day, British actress Pike has gone on to land a series of increasingly impressive roles.

In 2005, she starred in Pride & Prejudice, alongside Keira Knightley, and landed parts in the Tom Cruise-fronted Jack Reacher, Made in Dagenham and The World's End.

Pike's star turn in the psychological thriller Gone Girl landed her both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations and in 2018, she received rave reviews for her portrayal of war correspondent Marie Colvin in A Private War.

Additional reporting by Press Association

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