Naomie Harris practised crying as a child.
Naomie Harris
The 41-year-old actress - who stars as Miss Moneypenny in the James Bond franchise - has revealed that despite being a shy child, she's always loved make-believe and has been preparing for stardom for as long as she can remember.
Naomie - who was raised in London - explained: "I would spend hours in front of the mirror, pretending to be someone else, making myself cry, trying out accents - I just loved it, and would literally spend the whole day doing that.
"I was really lucky, because some mothers would have thought 'oh my God my child is just crazy', but my mum actually said 'ah, she has a talent, she has an interest'.
"She enrolled me at the Anna Scher Theatre School, and everything started from there, because they had an agency attached to the school and I started auditioning and got jobs."
Naomie admits she's moved into a "weird profession" in light of her shy nature.
But, speaking to the Irish Independent newspaper, she said: "What I really enjoyed was losing myself in character, finding out what it was like to be someone else, and getting inside that and disappearing, that's what I really loved as a child.
"I'm not shy anymore, but I'm not comfortable being in the spotlight, I'm not someone that enjoys being observed, I'm more of an observer, but I do still love that thing of where you find a character to such an extent that you actually feel like someone else, there's a freedom in that which I really enjoy."
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