“A delight”: The unlikely creative kinship David Cronenberg found in Keira Knightley
Canadian auteur David Cronenberg has ridden the waves of controversy. He has been the undisputed king of body horror ever since his debut in 1975 with Shivers. This gruesome picture set the tone for Cronenberg’s career of sex-and-splatter: an artificially engineered parasite that infects the residents of a comfortable apartment block, turning them into mindless, sex-crazed fiends, almost comically predicting the Covid-19 era.
Since then, he’s made literal heads explode in 1981’s Scanners – the film that put him on the map – given Debbie Harry a “fetish for danger” in 1983’s Videodrome, turned Jeff Goldblum into a grotesque human-fly hybrid in 1986’s The Fly remake, cloned Jeremy Irons in 1988’s Dead Ringers, and chucked James Spader into the underworld subculture of car-crash fetishists in 1996’s Crash. All of which remain some of cinema’s most visceral offerings—all of which also proving very demanding on the stars tasked with making such bizarre scenes relatable in some way.
With all that considered, Keira Knightley – British sweetheart, English rose – is not a name you’d immediately leap to when thinking of these spiralling Naked Lunch-like worlds. And that’s something Cronenberg set to change when casting her as the young brilliant Jewish patient Sabina Spielrein in 2011’s A Dangerous Method. Diagnosed with hysteria, the role of Spielrein was not only emotionally and physically taxing, but a type we’ve never seen Knightley play before.
A Dangerous Method takes the theme of a film like Crash, wherein victims of car accidents wrestle with their own trauma by tunnelling pain into the erotic, and goes back to its origin story. In telling of the feud between Jung and Freud, he also investigates, through Knightley’s role as Spielrein, how trauma and sexuality are linked. Diagnosed with hysteria, Spielrein was treated by Jung as a teenage patient, then later became his lover. Impressively, she later went on to graduate with a medical degree and become an analyst herself, as well as an ally of Freud.
This role solidified a departure from Knightley’s Hollywood It-girl status: she began her career at the tender age of 12 in an iconic role as Sabé in Star Wars, the foil for Natalie Portman’s Queen Padmé. Then, 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham saw her fame skyrocket and become the unofficial poster girl for tomboys across Britain.
Knightley has since taken on the role of rom-com leading lady with aplomb, delivering a memorable performance in Richard Curtis’ 2001 heart-melter Love Actually and portraying Lizzie Bennet in the 2005 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. Following these successes came the blockbusters, as she starred as Elizabeth Swann in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, with each film grossing around $650million.
Then came the wild curveball of Cronenberg, exposing fans to something entirely different. The difficulty of realistically portraying a character with hysteria attracted a degree of controversial backlash, something Cronenberg thought was “wrongheaded”. But it also showcased a daring new side to Knightley.
Speaking with Film Comment ahead of the film’s gala screening at the 2011 New York Film Festival, he said that “Keira and I felt that we were doing a very subdued version of what hysteria was, and what Jung documented as her symptoms. To do it totally accurately would be unbearable to watch”.
Cronenberg was obviously impressed by Knightley’s performance. When asked about how he directed her, he went on to sing her praises, “I had allotted a lot of time for those early scenes because I didn‘t know what she would need. I hadn’t directed her before. And those extreme scenes were the first scenes we shot. But she was fantastic. She needed very few takes“.
In some ways, it seemed as though being outside of her usual comfort zone was the perfect disposition for the role. As he added: “We were all just awestruck. She was incredibly well-prepared. She had a little binder with all kinds of notes and she would listen to music of the period and then she would just do it. And what’s more, she was a delight“.
Sometimes it just takes a certain kind of director to bring out sides of a star we’ve never seen before.
