English actress Rosamund Pike has said she was moved to tears when she first saw pictures of the real life couple she and her co-star David Oyelowo play in their new film, A United Kingdom.
The film tells the story of how African Prince Seretse Khama falls in love and marries London office girl Ruth Williams in post-war London much to the alarm of the English establishment and the tribes people of his homeland of Bechuanaland.
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Rosamund Pike talks to RTÉ Entertainment
Tribal elders and the British government both set about keeping the newly-weds apart and did their best to destroy the interracial marriage which they believed would threaten British interests in Africa at the time.
Speaking to RTÉ Entertainment, Pike said: “David Oyelowo had sent me the script and then another e mail came in and when I opened it, I saw these photographs of the couple. I looked at the faces of Ruth and Seretse... I didn’t know they were but I started to cry.
“It was very odd, it’s not a normal reaction but I just looked at these faces and something very profound took over. I don’t know quite what it was. I’ve never really analysed it too much but it was a definite calling, I think, to go and do this film.”
Pike is full of praise for her character and the way in which she broke away from the conservative constraints of her background and upbringing.
“Ruth Williams was a pretty ordinary girl from London, born to lower middle class parents but she was one of those women who were very liberated by their experiences during the Second World War,” Pike says.
“She had driven an ambulance at a crash airfield so she had been living on the brink of life and death dealing with stricken fighter pilots coming back from war.
“She’d stepped into a man’s shoes and I think she’d had a vision of how life could be bigger. However I don’t think she ever thought her life would take the direction it did, that she’d go to a Missionary Society dance in London in 1947 and fall in love with an African man she met there.”
A United Kingdom is out now. Read our review.
