“Everyone thought it was going to be shit”: Keira Knightley’s unlikely 2002 breakthrough
Sitting among some other movie stars at the absolutely insufferable upper-middle-class fruit-gobbling fashion show that is Wimbledon this week was Keira Knightley, who couldn’t have looked more in her element if she’d sat there holding a sign up saying ‘this is where I feel most comfortable’.
It got the tabloids all excited because she was with her fella, who apparently she isn’t seen with very often, but people had probably best get used to seeing her around London again, given she’s about to star in a West End adaptation of one of the greatest foreign films in recent memory, the brilliant, Oscar-winning German film The Lives of Others.
Released in 2006, when Knightley was bathing in the glow of being Academy Award-nominated herself for Pride and Prejudice, The Lives of Others is an ultra-paranoid German thriller about a couple of young lovers in East Berlin, a playwright and an actress, who find themselves under covert surveillance by the Stasi.
To be fair to Knightley, who can be something of a divisive actor that people either think is great (not me) or is basically on a par with Elisabeth Hurley in the first Austin Powers film (me), she has stacked up a fair few awards nominations in her time, the most recent being a Golden Globe shout for her Netflix drama Black Doves, which will be returning later this year for a second season.
Her recognition runs to two Academy Awards nominations, two Baftas, four Golden Globes and a Laurence Olivier nod, so she must be doing something right, even if some of us have genuinely turned films off after 20 mins because of her performances (holds hand up). And the more cynical among you might point out to the fact that while nominated, she hasn’t actually won any of these awards, and that is your right to do so.
Regardless, she’s been at it a long time now, since the early 2000s in fact, with her breakout role being 2003’s horrendous festive comedy Love Actually, but she had achieved a fair amount of success the year before that in the sports comedy Bend it Like Beckham, released when the London-born footballer was merely the most famous player in the world with a pop star wife, rather than the brand-sponsored, club-owning billionaire mogul he is now.
Telling the story of a Sikh teenager who wants to play football but can’t because of her strict parents, until a white teenager (Knightley) steps in and saves her by inviting her to play on her team, it stood out primarily for being a rare football-based movie that wasn’t absolutely abysmal.
Knightley herself had the same initial concerns when she was getting involved in the project, though, telling Bafta, “I was 16 when I did the film, and I felt very strongly about it. But I do remember going up for it, and I told people about it, and it was so embarrassing, it was like ‘Bend It Like Beckham? That sounds awful. What’s it about?’ ‘It’s about girls’ football’. ‘Oh my god’. You know, everyone thought it was going to be shit, and because of that, when I went up for it, I didn’t think I was going to get it… I thought it was all a bit silly anyway, so I sort of didn’t care.”
Fortunately, it paid off for her in a big way, because the Gurinder Chadha-directed film grossed some $92.2million on a budget of just $5.6m and attracted almost universally positive reviews, plus it featured a soundtrack stuffed full of stereotypically 2002 artists like Texas, Basement Jaxx and Melanie C.
