The director who didn’t want to work with Keira Knightley: “I don’t want you for this film”
In the film business, it’s easy to become typecasted and only seen for one type of role. Whether it be Daniel Craig and his journey to break away from James Bond, leading to strange and sometimes confrontational roles in Queer and Knives Out, or Helena Bonham Carter and being associated with quaint period dramas early on in her career.
Hollywood loves to put people into a box and continue showering them with roles that fulfil a limited persona, with great actors like Kathryn Hahn and Zendaya often being limited to supporting roles and rarely given leading parts.
Naturally, when certain people are already battling against reductive stereotypes, it can make the process of finding fulfilling work even trickier, something that Keira Knightley struggled with at a young age and left one director, particularly against the idea of working with her.
Knightley has had a glittering career from a very young age, with the actor dazzling audiences with her effortless screen presence with performances in Bend it Like Beckham and Love, Actually before being whisked away into the world of franchise filmmaking. The actor then spent many long years starring in the Pirates of the Caribbean series, with a number of iconic roles sprinkled alongside this time-consuming creative pursuit.
During this era of her career, she became renowned for her work in period dramas, starring in Pride and Prejudice, The Duchess and Silk, almost becoming the poster girl for the era and reprising countless roles in which she was dressed in grand costumes and surrounded by traditional sets. As a result, Knightley began to struggle to break away from this image, with many people recognising her for these characters and the global acclaim they garnered. It was because of this that she was desperate to be considered for a role in a tonally opposite film, despite the fact that her reputation did not work in her favour during the audition.
The Jacket, directed by John Maybury in 2005, follows a military veteran who travels into the future to foresee his death, being left with many haunting questions about how to save his life and family. The director is most known for this film as well as his 2007 project The Edge of Love, in which he has worked with Knightley on both. Despite his eventual collaboration with the actor, he was not convinced by her talents when casting The Jacket, saying, “I really didn’t want Keira for the part. But some of the producers were insistent that I meet this girl because she was box office. The first thing I said was: ‘I don’t want you for this film and they’re making me meet you, so why should I have you?’
While many actors might be perturbed or insulted by this blunt approach, Knightley had a razor sharp response, with Maybury saying, “She said, ‘If I don’t do your film I’m going to be wearing corsets for the next 20 years’. The smartness of that from an 18-year-old. She’d rehearsed some of the scenes and already had this persona down. I just realised I had been fooled by the illusion of her work that I’d seen. I realised there was a much deeper, much more intense actor there”.
Despite the initial rockiness of this encounter, Knightley holds fond memories over the experience and her work with the director, recalling the audition and saying, “I read for it, and the fucker didn’t say anything, so I got up and started walking to the door and thought ‘Oh, this is awful’. Then he said, ‘Keira, here’s my work number, here’s my mobile number, and I’ll see you in about a month’.”
