Rosamund Pike shrunk after portraying war journalist Marie Colvin

Rosamund Pike shrunk in height while playing late combat journalist Marie Colvin in A Private War.

The Gone Girl actress wanted to capture the war reporter's tense physical appearance for the film and to do so she would often slouch over and hunch her shoulders on set.

"When I first got into studying Marie, I watched footage of her online, there's something so compelling and just charismatic about her," she told Live with Kelly and Ryan. "I thought, 'OK, I don't want to transmit this through me, I want to get this odd physicality that she had.' She's someone whose career and life in the field wore heavy on her..."

However, Rosamund's acting method left her with some physical effects.

"I wanted to take her on in my whole body, which is changing the way I walk and actually kind of carry that tension that she carried with her," she explained. "I actually shrunk a centimeter-and-a-half playing her because I was so determined to hold my shoulders (like she did). I went for a medical for my next job and they measured me... (and I had shrunk). So I thought it was kind of cool that someone could live in your body and actually affect you permanently."

Colvin covered conflicts all over the world, including in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, and Libya, and was forced to wear an eye patch after she lost her left eye to shrapnel in Sri Lanka. She was killed in Syria in February, 2012 after illegally crossing into the country on the back of a motorbike to cover the Syrian civil war.