The character Keira Knightley misunderstood for 20 years: “Who did I play?”
Keira Knightley is deep in Netflix thriller territory right now, coming off her dismally reviewed but popular book-to-movie adaptation The Woman in Cabin 10, returning to film the second season of her hit series Black Doves, and while she’s a fan-favourite star for a reason, she once confused her role in one of the most iconic franchises of all time.
Knightley broke out with the empowering 2002 sports classic Bend It Like Beckham, which now has a sequel in development, but was catapulted to international fame starring in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, the surprising blockbuster hit of the summer. Amid the next two Pirates films, Knightley also earned her first Oscar nomination with the famous role of Lizzie Bennet in 2005’s Pride & Prejudice, but prior to it all, she actually starred in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace way back in 1999.
The major event of Star Wars returning to theatres would become tumultuous with fan criticisms of certain story elements, and the actor played an understated part in it all. Her character Sabé is Queen Amidala’s decoy in The Phantom Menace, with Knightley and Natalie Portman’s casting working out due to their resemblance to one another. The former’s Sabé is presented as the queen for much of the film, while the latter’s Padmé is seemingly her insightful handmaiden.
While Sabé gives orders (presumably with Padmé having told her what to say first) and contends with the Jedi bringing her and a small group to safety after the invasion of Naboo, Padmé is bonding with a young Anakin Skywalker, cleaning up R2-D2 as a thank you for saving all their lives, and insisting on seeing Tatooine for herself. A bit of the Jedi’s superiority comes across when Liam Neeson’s Qui-Gon Jinn starts taking risks without the queen’s knowledge, not realising that the young woman he is admonishing, saying that the queen trusts him, is in fact the queen herself.
When Knightley spoke to ComingSoon.Net while promoting her then-new film Misbehaviour, Padmé was brought up, to which she exclaimed, “Wait a minute… who did I play? Was I not Padmé?”, with the interviewer clarifying her query, as she noted, “Do you know, I saw the film once when…I think I was 12 when I did it, and I saw it the year after, and I’ve never seen it again. OK, so I was Sabé and I didn’t die.”
The character does not appear in any further on-screen Star Wars instalments, though she does have an extended storyline in the written Star Wars tie-in materials, but given the thorny reception to the prequel trilogy, both actors have luckily overshadowed this legacy with bigger and or at least more acclaimed roles, with Knightley stunning in turns such as Atonement and The Imitation Game, and Portman arguably most famous for her Oscar-winning role in Black Swan.
Still, many would think of this as a cool credit for Knightley to have as a small but crucial role, and Sabé even has her own moments of action in The Phantom Menace as well, so while Knightley has gone on to play more front-facing action heroines, Star Wars fans should always appreciate her contribution to their franchise.
