Vanessa Kirby 'repressed' herself for Napoleon

Vanessa Kirby had to “pull back [her] own personality” while filming ‘Napoleon’.

The 35-year-old actress stars opposite Joaquin Phoenix as the titular emperor’s wife Josephine and she felt she needed to “repress” herself in order to accurately portray the troubled empress, who was ousted from her marriage after being unable to bear children.

Vanessa told Britain’s HELLO! magazine: “I felt like I had to bring less of myself and actually pull back my own personality a lot.

“Josephine was so enigmatic and unusual.

“She had to repress her feelings in order to survive, so that is how I approached playing her.”

Vanessa particularly enjoyed working with Joaquin.

She said: “I love him and it was so magic to play the special kind of intimacy and intensity between these two historical figures.

“I had a really good time.

“Even though it was a really dysfunctional relationship in many ways, they had this chemistry that was very potent.”

And the blonde beauty was thankful that the “playfulness” shared between the characters was echoed on set, making it easier when filming “an intense and brutal time”.

Vanessa added: “It was hard but we found we had to laugh sometimes between takes to get through that.

“We had to bring some lightness ot it because of the intensity of this world and the fact that Josephine wasn’t able to have a child.

“They loved one another as outsiders and they had this strange magnetism through all of their lives, even though they were living in the most extreme of times.

“We could never get hold of what it was about them exactly, but we had so much fun trying to figure it out.”