USA TODAY International Edition
Rosamund Pike is on a ‘War’ path
Actress sparks Oscar talk playing correspondent
When Rosamund Pike signed on early last year to “A Private War,” a biopic of tenacious war correspondent Marie Colvin, she couldn’t have imagined how much it’d resonate in the current climate.
“I didn’t realize how timely it would be, with journalists under attack and truthful reporting suddenly called into question,” Pike says. “I feel that there’s no better moment to be telling the story of a journalist who literally put herself on the line to give a voice to people who didn’t have a voice themselves.”
“A Private War” (in theaters Nov. 2 in New York and Los Angeles, expanding nationwide Nov. 16) traces the threedecade-long career of Colvin, an American reporter for British newspaper The Sunday Times who was killed on assignment in Syria in 2012 at age 56. The film’s trailer and poster, as well as a handful of new images, are exclusively premiering on usatoday.com.
Co-starring Jamie Dornan and Stanley Tucci, the drama follows Colvin into some of the most dangerous regions of the Middle East, covering conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, and going toe-totoe with Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi in an interview. It also shows her struggles re-acclimating to civilian life, using alcohol and her wicked sense of humor to stave off the nightmares of what she’d seen in war zones.
“She’d say that at parties in London, she didn’t want to walk across the room and have people say, ‘Oh, here come stories about Beirut again,’ ”says Pike, who is back in the awards race this year after her Oscar-nominated turn in 2014’s “Gone Girl.” “She wanted for people to feel that there was a humor and spirit to her; that just because you’ve seen suffering, doesn’t mean you live suffering at every moment. But of course, she was haunted forever by everything she saw.”
To prepare for the role, Pike, 39, spoke to many of Colvin’s friends, including photographer Paul Conroy, who is played by Dornan in the movie and was on set in Jordan throughout shooting. She also pored over footage of Colvin, trying to replicate her physicality and voice.
Given director Matthew Heineman’s background in documentaries such as “Cartel Land” and “City of Ghosts,” “I wanted to give him a version of the character that he could film at any point he chose, so if we were traveling in a car somewhere, he could just turn his camera on and find Marie,” Pike says.
The biggest challenge was playing blind in her left eye, which Colvin lost after she was hit by shrapnel in Sri Lanka in 2001. Colvin donned an eye patch from then on, which Pike opted to wear even when she wasn’t filming.
“I thought it was important for me to experience the world as it really was with the eye patch, so I’d walk through the streets and go out for dinner with it on,” Pike says. “Living with the eye patch was very disconcerting, actually. ... Also, people react to you with it: children with fear or laughter or surprise. Everybody stares.”
“There’s no better moment to be telling the story of a journalist who literally put herself on the line to give a voice to people who didn’t have a voice themselves.”
Rosamund Pike