The star-making movies Keira Knightley was mocked for: “It was quite embarrassing, really”
In the early 2000s, Keira Knightley almost immediately established herself as one of the industry’s fastest-rising stars, playing lead roles in several major films before leaving her teenage years. Ironically, she was initially apprehensive about the projects that shot her to fame, fearing that the concepts sounded silly.
Knightley started out in small roles in film and TV before landing her breakthrough role as Jules in Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham, which was released in the United Kingdom just weeks after she turned 17 years old. At the time, an independent movie about women’s football didn’t sound like a big deal, but it was.
Bend It Like Beckham would recoup its budget more than 15 times over at the box office and leave a sizeable cultural footprint, fittingly making a mockery of the people who mocked Knightley for playing her first major leading role in a mainstream feature under such niche circumstances.
“I remember telling friends I was doing this girls’ soccer movie called Bend It Like Beckham,” she explained to CBS, “And everybody laughed. It was sort of quite embarrassing, really. And nobody thought it was gonna be any good.” However, her friends were proven wrong, as the film was a huge hit globally that inspired a generation of aspiring female footballers.
Following on from the unexpected success of Bend It Like Beckham, Knightley was cast as Elizabeth Swann in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, her first Hollywood lead. Thanks almost entirely to Cutthroat Island, many were predicting the swashbuckling blockbuster to be a disaster, never mind that it was based on a theme park attraction.
Once again, her nearest and dearest remained sceptical. “I said it was based on a Disney theme park ride,” she recalled. “And everyone just went, ‘Oh, that sounds good. Yeah. Good luck with that one!'” That said, they weren’t the only ones. “I remember being on set just sort of going, ‘OK, what is this? Is this any good?'” Obviously, the scepticism was misplaced, as the film launched a multi-billion-dollar franchise.
Knightley needn’t have listened to the scepticism, with those two movies rocketing her to stardom and paving the way for the actor to get her first Academy Award nomination at only 20 years old for her performance as Elizabeth Bennett in Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice. Pirates could even be credited as the origin of Knightley’s penchant for period dramas, for which the world should be eternally grateful.
On the surface, a low-budget football flick and an expensive risk set in a genre that had been labelled cursed could have backfired and left Knightley zero-for-two. Instead, the combined success of both laid the groundwork for her entire career, forcing those who doubted her choices to feast on a hefty slice of humble pie.
