“Well, this is weird”: The “vaguely psychotic” role Keira Knightley couldn’t escape
Apparently, impartiality is still a key factor in journalism in order to give a rounded, balanced view to the audience, and to present a cogent and well-reasoned argument without underlying bias, illustrating two opposing points of view.
That being the case, let’s talk about Keira Knightley while I attempt to hide the fact that she is quite probably my least favourite actor by quite some distance.
I should point out that I have never met her, and she might be really pleasant, and if that’s the case, then more power to her, for she’s done very well for herself. And, again, my opinion is just my opinion and not fact; many people think she’s great, but I just happen to have had several experiences where I have been watching a film, and she has said some lines, and then I have gone ‘Alright, that’s me done’ and turned it off (2014’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit being a prime example).
Nevertheless, Knightley is probably one of Britain’s most successful exports of the 21st century, along with, possibly, tartan blankets, and has been since she appeared first in the dubious morals comedy Love Actually, and then in several of Disney’s swashbuckling ‘people with octopus faces and Johnny Depp unable to stand up properly’ mega-franchise Pirates of the Caribbean from 2003 onwards.
It was in these early years that the critics evidently saw something I never could and she picked up the first of her Academy Award nominations, for 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, but again, I would genuinely file ‘period drama’ at the bottom of my list of things I would watch, just below ‘a pan of pasta that’s taken ages to start boiling’.
Knightley also won a Golden Globe nomination for Joe Wright’s Atonement two years later, but her most successful period was probably the mid-2010s. She won another Golden Globe shout for appearing alongside Benedict Cumberbatch in The Imitation Game in 2014, which was admittedly a good watch, and the second of her Oscar noms the same year for the same film. That prompted a spell the following year on Broadway in a stage adaptation of a French novel from the late 1800s called Thérèse Raquin, the story of a woman trapped in a loveless marriage who embarks on a passionate but murderous affair.
Knightley had been offered the role twice before, but had turned it down because it was something “I don’t know how to do”, which may have meant acting without doing that coy smiley teeth thing. But, regardless, she professed to the NYT that she was confused as to why the offers kept coming, saying, “Why do people keep seeing me as this vaguely psychotic repressed strange woman?… When it came back to me the third time, I thought, ‘Well, this is weird’. And I am still frightened of it, and I don’t know how to do it, and there are so many problems with putting it on. But I was sort of up for the challenge.”
Unfortunately, despite running for three months at the end of 2015, the play, once it came out, didn’t fare particularly well, with The Guardian calling it “damp” and others saying that it inspired giggles, which is probably not the desired effect from a serious, tragic drama. Knightley, meanwhile, will soon be making more of her Netflix spy show Black Doves, and, wonderfully ironically, a comedy with Jamie Dornan titled The Worst.
