The role that traumatised Keira Knightley: “I found it pretty horrific”
Keira Knightley rocketed to fame in 2003 when she appeared as the feisty Elizabeth Swann in the box office juggernaut Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. At 18, she was an A-list celebrity and romantic symbol thanks to the crackling chemistry between her and co-star Orlando Bloom. She appeared in the second and third instalments of the franchise but quickly pivoted to literary period dramas like Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, and Silk.
During this period in her career, Knightley was not only one of Hollywood’s most bankable stars but a critically acclaimed one as well. She earned an Academy Award nomination for her role in Pride & Prejudice and Bafta and Golden Globe nominations for Atonement. But just when she reached the heights of the industry, her roles became fewer, and the movies she appeared in became lower budget and more niche.
In 2011, she appeared in a David Cronenberg historical drama about the dawn of psychoanalysis called A Dangerous Method. A year later, she appeared in an apocalyptic rom-com directed by Lorene Scafaria called Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. A year after that, she appeared in Begin Again, a musical helmed by Once director John Carney, in which she plays a promising young musician.
All of these roles and her three-year hiatus from the big screen starting in 2022 have suggested that Knightley was looking for a way out of the spotlight without having to give up acting altogether. Speaking to Variety in 2018, she revealed that her retreat from the Hollywood mainstream wasn’t just about her career goals; it was about how the fame she achieved as a teenager with the Pirates of the Caribbean movies had affected her.
“I found it pretty horrific,” she said of her sudden stardom. “I’m not an extrovert, so I found that level of scrutiny and that level of fame really hard. It was an age where you are becoming, you haven’t become, and you need to make mistakes. It’s a very precarious age, particularly for women. You’re in some ways still a child.”
Still, Knightley can see the silver linings in how it all played out. “It was traumatic,” she acknowledged, “[But it set up the rest of my career. So, looking back, would I do anything different? No, I wouldn’t because I’m unbelievably lucky now, and my career is in a place where I really enjoy it, and I have a level of fame that’s much less intense. I can deal with it now, and that’s great. But at the time, it was not so great, and took many years of therapy to figure it out.”
Knightley’s career has followed a similar trajectory to other actors who have become global stars at a young age. Kristen Stewart has avoided mainstream blockbusters since her stint in the Twilight saga, and Daniel Radcliffe and Elijah Wood have gone out of their way to find unusual projects in the wake of their roles in Harry Potter and the Lord of the Rings, respectively.
Although Knightley isn’t as busy making movies as she used to be, it’s impossible to deny that the calibre of the projects she’s worked on has heightened over time. She’s received some of the best reviews of her career for films like the 2018 historical biopic Colette and the 2019 drama Official Secrets. Now, she’s slated to appear in the upcoming thriller series Black Doves on Netflix.
