How Rosamund Pike went from playing Moiraine to voicing new Wheel of Time audiobooks
Rosamund Pike is a major force behind The Wheel of Time TV series, which will soon return for season 2 on Amazon Prime Video. As Moiraine Damodred, her character is responsible for guiding the story's young protagonists out of their small home village and into the wider world of fantasy adventure. Pike told EW back in 2021 that she moved her family to Prague for the show's production, which has been lengthened by delays from the COVID-19 pandemic.
But Pike's deep passion for The Wheel of Time goes beyond her role in the TV adaptation. Recently she also started narrating a new edition of audiobooks for Robert Jordan's beloved fantasy series. The third volume, The Dragon Reborn, was released just this week from Macmillan Audio.
Pike's director for the audiobooks is actually her own mother, Caroline Friend, a former opera singer. Their shared love for audiobooks goes back to Pike's childhood.
"When I was a child, we would often travel quite long distances in cars, and we'd listen to books on tape," Pike tells EW. "We would always discuss the readers and whether they were successful, because some we really didn't respond to, but others were absolutely wonderful."
Narrating audiobooks thus felt like a natural outgrowth of Pike's acting career. She recalls William Boyd's novel Restless as being her first, but she's also done a version of Pride & Prejudice, which makes the new Wheel of Time editions the second time that Pike has voiced an audiobook after previously appearing in the novel's screen adaptation.
But going from actor to audiobook narrator is not a one-to-one move. For one thing, you have to become the voice of every character in the story, not just one. For another, Pike tells EW, you have to move frequently between different moods.
"You can be on the point of breaking with emotion as you play some very difficult scene, but then the narration in between the dialogue has to be sharp and clear," Pike says. "That's one of the difficulties: Characters can break, but the narration must stay, and you've got to be all those people. As an actor, you're taught that if you've got a soliloquy or something, you have to know how to vary the pace and the rhythm, the dynamic range of a passage. But some chapters require a more lyrical quality, while some are about adrenaline. It actually took us both into Robert Jordan's mind in a different way."
Although listeners just hear the final product as pure audio, Pike can't help but get physical in her performance of Jordan's words.
"When Rosamund does voices, she just becomes the character," Friend says. "That's what you hear. You hear Lan talking to Moiraine, and you hear wee bits of narration 'he said, she said' in between. I don't know how you do it. When I look into the studio, particularly in the dramatic bits, sometimes she gets big. But you obviously have to be on the microphone."
Pike elaborates, "I usually go between sitting and standing, because there are some characters I can't do sitting down — like, funnily enough, Siuan Sanche, the Amyrlin Seat, because of where the voice comes from. And of course Loial."
She continues, "You have to feel it. So if a character is an anxious man, you've got to feel that you are this anxious little person who's looking up at everybody and feeling a bit inferior, but also wants to be very obsequious. You have to let them all into you, and feel who they are."
The experience of working on these audiobooks together brought home, both for Pike and Friend, the scale of what Jordan accomplished with The Wheel of Time. Although the series starts off feeling very much like The Lord of the Rings, by the end of the first book it's clear that was only a starting point.
"When I read it for the first time, my first thought was oh, this is straightforward, it's just like Tolkien," Friend says. "And then you quickly realize it isn't at all. It becomes much wider, much bigger, and then it becomes something else altogether."
"I always understood that Robert Jordan had almost written the first book as a therapeutic exercise to sort of come to terms with his experiences in Vietnam," Pike says. "Over the course of the series, I think you can feel him working through the contradictions that he experienced: The struggle for balance, understanding and appreciating that the world functions because both things coexist — good and evil — and are sort of binary ways of thinking. Both are necessary for understanding and decoding the world."
The first three volumes of The Wheel of Time — The Eye of the World, The Great Hunt, and The Dragon Reborn — are available now with Pike's narration from Macmillan Audio. Season 2 of the TV series premieres Sept. 1 on Prime Video.
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Based on the bestselling series of novels by Robert Jordan, this fantasy show follows the mystic Moiraine (Rosamund Pike) as she searches for the reincarnated messiah figure known as the Dragon Reborn, who can save the world from the Dark One
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