GAH Rosamund Pike is so beautiful. You know what I think about too much? How weird it is that she’s not typecast permanently in period dramas and “English rose” roles. It’s strange that someone who looks like dictionary definition of “English aristocrat” plays so many Americans and rough-and-tumble types. Incidentally, I feel the same way about Michelle Dockery – she also has that haughty, aristocratic look. Rosamund covers the Dec/Jan 2019 issue of Town & Country to promote A Private War, the bio-pic of American journalist Marie Colvin. I think there’s a good chance Rosamund will be getting some big award nominations for this. You can read T&C’s cover story here. Some highlights:

Rosamund actually shrank to play Marie: The actress worked so hard to blend into the character she actually shrank— from hunching her shoulders to mimic Marie’s posture. “When I went for a medical examination after A Private War,” she says, “I was one and a half centimeters shorter.”

Her respect for war reporters: “It was an homage to her, but also an homage to journalists.”

On her hope for audiences after seeing A Private War: “I want people to care about journalism again.”

Her ordinary life with her partner & two sons: “I want to recreate the childhood that I had for my own children,” she says, adding that she tries to expose them to books and music and raise them with no sense of entitlement. When she and her family wander around London, they do it on the Tube. “People might recognize me, but I think they just see me as a mother trying to handle small kids on the subway.”

She gave birth to her second son early, in her mother’s apartment. “There was no time for pain medication, no time to get to the clinic, so I just let my body take over. I thought, If I can let my mind go somewhere else, my body will do the job.” Her son arrived healthy, but Pike believes her body absorbed the trauma and can recall it.

[From Town & Country]

Her description of her second birth is going to give me nightmares. I know a lot of women forgo drugs and hospital births, but they make that decision ahead of time as part of their birthing plan. The idea that labor is happening so fast that you can’t even make it to the hospital and you just have to give birth where you are, with no drugs? Nightmare. As for caring about journalism… Town & Country even name-checks Donald Trump and his repeated fascistic statements that journalists are “the enemies of the people.” Journalism matters. Smart journalism matters. So I hope this movie is really good (the reviews are great).

Photos courtesy of Liz Collins for Town & Country, received from promotional T&C email.