The blue carpet and the cast of ‘The Wheel of Time’

Rosamund Pike, Daniel Henney and the cast of Amazon Prime Video’s new series discuss Robert Jordan’s epic and representation of gender

It’s a cold November evening in London when Rosamund Pike steps on to the blue carpet at the BFI IMAX in Waterloo. Dressed in a hooded sheer white toga-style Christian Dior silk gown and bodysuit (from the Cruise 2022 line), the Oscar nominee looks like she’s just magicked herself there from the White Tower of Tar Valon, the seat of the mighty Aes Sedai in The Wheel of Time series. Quite fitting for the British actor who plays Moiraine Damodred, a powerful magic-user from author Robert Jordan’s 14-book high fantasy, who upends the lives of five youngsters in her quest to find the Dragon Reborn, a messiah of sorts to stop the ultimate evil.

Pike is the last to arrive at the much-awaited premiere of the new Amazon Prime Video series, but also one of the most anticipated. Her remarks about how you’ll see “more naked men than naked women” in the show “which is quite pleasing, since women have been asked to expose themselves forever and a day” have already been doing the rounds online. At the time, she was responding to the inevitable comparisons with Game of Thrones.

Though the Gone Girl actor’s blue carpet appearance is brief, she finds time to tell me that it’s the representation of gender — of how women operate on equal terms with the men in the books — that drew her to the series. “Usually a guide character in any fantasy book is a man, and here it was interesting to see a woman who changes the lives of people. So, in the spiritual sense, it came at the right time for me to explore a power outside of myself,” she says, adding, “The whole idea of channelling was also very appealing to me.”