{"id":34277,"date":"2023-06-26T10:00:14","date_gmt":"2023-06-26T08:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.radiotimes.com\/?p=1849248"},"modified":"2023-06-26T10:16:15","modified_gmt":"2023-06-26T08:16:15","slug":"i-wish-i-could-just-be-a-voice-rosamund-pike-on-her-new-podcast-drama-and-her-love-for-audio","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/radiotimes\/rss_feed\/i-wish-i-could-just-be-a-voice-rosamund-pike-on-her-new-podcast-drama-and-her-love-for-audio\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI wish I could just be a voice\u201d: Rosamund Pike on her new podcast drama and her love for audio"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pike plays a woman whose past catches up to her in a new audio drama based on the novel by Kim Hooper. <\/p>

By David Crawford\n \t\t<\/p>

Published: Monday, 26 June 2023 at 12:00 am<\/p>

\n\n

Two thousand seven hundred and sixty three people died in New York on 9\/11. Yet within that official statistic are a number of people who disappeared on that day and whose remains have never been found. That mysterious gap in knowledge is the basis for Kim Hooper\u2019s novel People Who Knew Me<\/a>, in which New Yorker Emily uses the horror of those murderous attacks as an opportunity to flee a difficult family situation and set up a new life in California as Connie Pryne, bringing up a daughter, Claire, on her own. Yet 14 years later, when she receives a cancer diagnosis, she realises she must confront the life she ran away from, if only for the sake of Claire.<\/p>\n

Now the book has been dramatised by theatre writer Daniella Issacs and Sharon Horgan\u2019s Merman Pictures as a podcast for BBC Radio 4, starring Oscar-nominated actor Rosamund Pike and Hugh Laurie. Speaking to Radio Times<\/strong>, Pike was unequivocal about what drew her to the role of Emily\/Connie.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m interested in lying: characters who don\u2019t tell the truth or manipulate the truth are extremely interesting to play \u2013 think Amy Dunne (Gone Girl<\/a>) or Marla Grayson (I Care a Lot<\/a>). The idea of someone using the National Tragedy of 9\/11 to fake their own death, and escape one lie, only to find themselves supporting a much more intricate web of lies was very compelling. I am interested in the ways lies gather energy \u2013 which inevitably, sooner or later, becomes too strong to contain.\u201d<\/p>\n

The writer Isaacs concurs with that view about the appeal of the story: \u201cI\u2019ve always had a fascination with the spectrum of truth and lies. I was thinking as I was writing it about what makes people lie. We all lie. I lie. But the way [Connie] struggles through her lie is to never be the bad guy. [She\u2019s not really bad] she\u2019s a messy woman responding to a messy world.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s that compassion for Connie\/Emily and Isaacs\u2019s empathetic treatment of the situation that resonated with Pike. She enthused: \u201c[Daniella] wrote these scripts beautifully; and that\u2019s why, although what [Emily] does is deplorable, we understand it, and we feel the mess it creates, and the terrible burden it imposes on her.\u201d<\/p>

So while Emily\/Connie can be grouped with previous duplicitous Pike characters such as Amy Dunne and Maria Grayson, the actor is keen to emphasise that the experience of playing those famed manipulators didn\u2019t inform how she approached playing this role. \u201cEmily\/Connie is not a killer. She is also far more of a coward than Amy Dunne. It is cowardice that traps Emily in the first place, the cowardice of not being able to come clean and take responsibility for her own behaviour. Amy is a narcissistic sociopath. I don\u2019t think Emily\/Connie is either of these things. She does something that has a devastating impact on other people. Those people may never be able to trust again, but she is not a sociopath.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although she can relate, to a certain degree, with how Emily reacts to the problems in her life, the idea of living a lie to get away from a difficult situation is not one that Pike would personally ever consider. In what could almost be a mantra, she says, \u201cI have learnt that telling the truth always frees you.\u201d<\/p>\n

Isaacs, by contrast, hints at a darker side to her personality when discussing the appeal of writing about Emily\/Connie and the effect of her decision on those around her: \u201cI fear this makes me sound like a psychopath, but I enjoy writing characters that transgress what is societally acceptable. Because I\u2019m constantly suppressing things to be acceptable, perhaps writing about these things helps me not do them.\u201d<\/p>\n

But both women readily agree that adapting Hooper\u2019s novel as an audio drama was an opportunity to get deeper into the character of Emily\/Connie at two stages of her life, as a recent graduate starting out on a romance and then years later in Los Angeles, when she\u2019s looking back on what she did to escape from New York and the consequences of her actions.<\/p>\n

Isaacs says, \u201cI was really excited\u2026 for two reasons. Firstly for allowing us as listeners to immerse ourselves into her psyche, more than could be done by watching her. And I liked the idea of eavesdropping on conversations. I wanted to make it as real as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pike adds: \u201cAs this is audio, I can play both Emily in her 20s in New York and Connie in her 40s in LA \u2013 both her identities, the real and the reconstructed; and there is a third character, Connie\u2019s internal voice, the voice that cannot lie\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

Isaacs also directed the drama and the way she recorded, eschewing the traditional radio drama set-up of actors in front of microphone stands, scripts in hand, in favour of the actors wearing headset mics and using tablets for scripts so they could be mobile and as naturalistic as possible, was something that Pike enjoyed: \u201cDaniella embraced the messiness of real life through the audio \u2013 she wanted to hear mouth noises, sniffs, chewing, snivelling, breathing, catches of emotion, voice cracking \u2013 all the things engineers often try to iron out. She encouraged us to play and live the scenes, physicality was a huge key \u2013 you hear physicality in the voice, if the character is moving, bending, sitting or standing, eating, driving, taking a shower \u2013 you hear it all. It certainly was [liberating].\u201d<\/p>\n

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