Vanessa Kirby says ‘Pieces of a Woman’ role changed her

VANESSA Kirby thinks her role in Pieces of a Woman has given her a “greater empathy” for women experiencing baby loss.

The 33-year-old actress plays a first-time mother who loses her child during a home birth in the Kornél Mundruczó-directed drama film, and Kirby admits it’s left a lasting impression on her.

She told E! News: “I think kind of imagining and speaking to the number of women I spent time with who have lost babies, and imagining that level of grief and kind of living through that through the film ...

“I notice now that it’s given me such a kind of greater empathy or maybe sensitivity if someone’s going though a hard time ... I’m lucky enough not to have gone through something to that level of grief.”

Kirby thinks it’s ultimately important that women are portrayed in a variety of ways on the big screen.

The actress previously explained: “I feel like now, more than ever, it’s all of our responsibility to have other things represented on screen.

“There have been so many male stories on screen, or stories of women written by men, so she’s the wife of someone, the girlfriend of someone.

“It’s only now I realise that looking back, all the scripts I’ve read over time, unless they’re really small indie films, the women have always been fantasy figures, always viewed through the male lens, almost cartoony.”

Kirby said she doesn’t want to be shot for “sexualisation”.

"I don’t want an a*** shot – well, not that they’d want one of my a***. But I don’t want to be shot through a lens of sexualisation. That’s not me. That’s the distorted feminine and the distorted masculine."