Amid the rise of wellness industry where Gwyneth Paltrow is among the leaders, the 'Pride and Prejudice' star thinks people are being swindled by the practices.
- Jun 13, 2023
AceShowbiz - Rosamund Pike insists people are being "conned" by the wellness industry. The 44-year-old actress knows why it is a "seductive" business but warns the idea of being healthy is "no longer enough" is leading to some "really dangerous" practices.
"I think we're all being conned by the wellness industry," Rosamund told Observer New Review when she was asked about a satirical joke about Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop in her new audio drama "People Who Knew Me".
"This idea that it's no longer enough to be healthy and we have to be 'well' is something that needs to be interrogated. Yet it's so seductive because it's in pursuit of things that people are ashamed to want, like youth, beauty and fitness."
"#MeToo gave women an opportunity to escape some of the demands put on them. Now, in a way, people are voluntarily flocking back to being controlled but in a different guise, by these wellness claims. It's politicised our food, politicised our exercise and I think it's really dangerous."
The "I Care a Lot" actress is fascinated by deep-cover spies and undercover work, so she was delighted to get involved with narrating the podcast "Mother, Neighbor, Russian Spy", which tells the tale of Russian agents working in America in the early 2000s.
She said, "Because I pretend to be other people for a living, I'm very drawn to stories about what it would be like to never break cover. I have friends in the FBI and have always been interested by their undercover work - although it's highly classified, of course."
"With this, I didn't want to just be the hired voice, I wanted to be really collaborative with the producers. Thanks to contacts I'd made when I played an FBI agent in [2019 film] 'The Informer', I was able to gain access to people within the FBI. We were fortunate enough to interview a retired agent who'd been very close to the case. I even went to the house in New Jersey where the sleeper agents lived. I went quite deep."
