Rosamund Pike feared she had ME after playing 'troubled' characters back-to-back

Rosamund Pike thought she was suffering from the chronic fatigue syndrome ME because her "whole system shut down" after filming two intense movies.

The Gone Girl star's body shut down "in quite a scary way" after she put it through the back-to-back traumatic experiences of playing war correspondent Marie Colvin in 2018's A Private War and pioneering physicist and chemist Marie Curie in 2019's Radioactive.

"I played a war correspondent for The Sunday Times called Marie Colvin and I played Marie Curie, both of who were amazing, strong, clever forces of nature but also quite troubled. I made the mistake of playing them back to back and that left me a bit troubled," she shared on David Tennant Does A Podcast With...

"Actually, my whole system shut down in quite a scary way. Which can happened because the body just thinks I can't take any more of whatever the chemical cocktail you're asking it to produce. You trick it with trauma."

The Oscar nominee admitted the intense filming experiences left her so exhausted that she was worried she had myalgic encephalomyelitis, which is also called chronic fatigue syndrome or ME/CFS.

"It shut down and I thought, 'Oh my God, I've got ME or something.' I thought something is really (wrong). I'm never going to get my vitality back. And I did," she continued.

Pike explained that she signed up to play Moiraine Damodred in the fantasy TV show The Wheel of Time partly as a result of her experience.

"Fantasy seemed like a nice invitation (after that), to step somewhere the opposite of reality," she added.

The third season of The Wheel of Time premiered on Prime Video last month.