Rosamund Pike used to feel like she was being ‘eaten alive’ at red carpets

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.

“Pierce Brosnan first warned me about it, because the first ever photocall I had to do was for the announcement for the 20th Bond film – 40 years of Bond.

“And 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.”

The Gone Girl actress stars as Nobel Prize-winning scientist Marie Curie in Radioactive, directed by Marjane Satrapi.

She said she doubted whether Curie would approve of the glitz of a red carpet.

“She’d be very disapproving and scathing about it,” she joked.

Radioactive is available to watch on digital platforms now.