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Natalie Dormer is Self Magazine's April 2015 cover star. Inside the issue, she talks about how she balanced her crazy Mockingjay Part 1 and 2 shooting schedule with training for the London marathon, and how the training actually enhanced her performance as Cressida:
Natalie Dormer doesn’t scare easily. She once shaved her head for a role. She has a tattoo on the inside of her left forearm that reads: FEAR IS THE MIND-KILLER. As Margaery Tyrell on Game of Thrones, she held her own against King Joffrey—one of the biggest psychopaths ever to appear on television—then married him.
But even someone as bold as Dormer wondered what she’d gotten herself into when she signed on to run her first marathon. It was 2013, and she had just agreed to play Cressida, the semiautomatic weapon–toting PR girl turned warrior, in the Hunger Games franchise. The role required her to report for work at 5 a.m. every day, so that half of her head could be shaved and an intricate fake tattoo could be applied to her scalp. Then, after 12-hour days of shooting battle scenes, she’d spend another hour working out at night, alternating between running the hilly streets of Atlanta—where filming took place—and doing interval sessions at a local gym. All of this was to prep for the April 2014 London marathon. “I actually look back on it now and think, F—ing hell, how did I do that?” she says.
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It’s a reasonable question—for those who aren’t acquainted with the 33-year-old actress’s unstoppable drive. After all, she’d never competed in a race that long before. She signed up to run in London before she knew that The Hunger Games: Mockingjay—Part 1 and Part 2 shooting schedule would require her to report to set before dawn. “My way of surviving it was a nap at lunch,” she says. The schedule and exercise regimen both seemed like crazy ideas at first, but in hindsight her plan was serendipitous. “In Mockingjay—Part 2, I’m basically running around in heavy armor while carrying a semiautomatic rifle,” she says of the film that will hit theaters this fall. “I don’t know how I would have kept up with [costars] Liam Hemsworth or Sam Claflin if I hadn’t been in the best cardiovascular shape of my life.”
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It was important for Dormer to find quick ways to embody each of those characters, because her packed filming schedule didn’t allow her much time to ease her way in. Once filming of the fourth season of Game of Thrones wrapped in Europe in fall 2013, she jetted straight to Atlanta for back-to-back shoots of Mockingjay—Part 1 and Part 2, which took nine months to complete. Then, after just a few days off, she flew back to Europe and put on her Rapunzel-like Margaery wig to begin filming the fifth season of Thrones, which premieres April 12.
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