Can you spot Rosamund Pike's dummy stand-in on The Wheel Of Time?

Turns out actors aren't always the ones playing sleeping versions of themselves

By Marah Eakin  |  November 18, 2021 | 3:00pm
TV Features Rosamund Pike
Can you spot Rosamund Pike's dummy stand-in on The Wheel Of Time?
Lan Mondragoran (Daniel Henney) and Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) eyeball a town in Amazon Prime Video’s new series The Wheel Of Time Photo: Photo: Jan Thijs / Amazon Studios

What exactly happens when an actor is “injured” or “asleep” in a scene? Does that actor just get to kick back and take a nap while all the other actors and action whooshes on around them?

Not according to Rosamund Pike—at least not in the sense you’d think. When her character in Amazon Prime Video’s new series The Wheel Of Time was injured and was subsequently carried around face down on the back of a horse for what seems like days, Pike says she opted for a somewhat more elegant solution than actually facing the ride herself.

As she tells us in the video above, Pike instead opted for a stunt dummy, one that her co-star Daniel Henney says led to him “riding a 14 foot Friesian [horse] through the forest with an 85 pound dummy.”

Pike actually thinks her character Moiraine’s stillness in those scenes could be an asset. As she told us:

“I love the balance in her. I love the contradiction between how still and calm she can be, knowing the tremendous power that she can unleash. I think it’s interesting to be that quiet and calm and stealthy when the polar opposite is when you’re unleashing, just creating fires and cooling down lightning from the sky. I think it’s always interesting when a character has great power to know what they’re like in stillness.”

Pike also had big thoughts about how she wanted to create Moiraine’s channeling motions, saying:

“It was very, very important to me that you would believe that I was channeling if there were no visual effects. I wanted to feel that an audience could believe that this essence that was flooding me was was coming in a kind of vascular way into my veins, as Robert Jordan describes in the books…

He describes The One very, very evocatively, like a kind of delicious, addictive elixir that can possess you, but is also dangerous when you get too much of it. It can burn you through and you have to learn to control it…

I want to feel that it’s filling me and it’s something that you almost have to wrestle with. You have to draw it and it has weight.

I think too often magic seems flimsy. I wanted to see the impact of it coursing through your body because it’s not like you just produce it… you are the channel. It’s coming through you.”

The Wheel Of Time premieres Friday, November 19 on Amazon Prime Video.

 
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