Looking to the past, bringing out drama
Knightley delved into grief for new wartime movie The Aftermath
British actress Keira Knightley is calling from London, and wondering just how special she is.
Last December she was awarded the OBE (becoming an Officer of the Order of the British Empire) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list, in recognition of her services to drama and charity (WaterAid and Oxfam).
Knightley received her royal accolade from Prince Charles in a ceremony at Buckingham Palace, dressed in a yellow tweed ensemble that Harper’s Bazaar called “the chicest Chanel skirt suit.”
The honour was all very lovely — “Very classy!” she says — but what does an OBE actually do for a person? Does it allow you to jump queues or park in front of Big Ben?
“My husband was asking this!” she says with a laugh. She’s married to indie rock musician James Righton, with whom she has a 3-year-old daughter, Edie.
“He was like, ‘So, what do we get? Do you get to go to special clubs?’ No, you don’t get anything. I mean, it’s a very nice gold badge. It’s probably not actually gold, but you know, it’s golden.”
And the man who gave it to her is, after all, first in line to the throne.
“Who knows how long, but at some point, he’s meant to be king,” Knightley agrees. “So, I will at some point be able to say, ‘I’ve met the king!’ ”
The star, who turns 34 on Tuesday, has good reason to feel an affinity with regal figures and their implicit ties to historical realms.
Her most acclaimed movies have been set in the past and tied to momentous people and events, both real and fictional. These include the two films that earned her Oscar nominations for acting: wartime drama The Imitation Game (2014) and the
Jane Austen adaptation Pride & Prejudice (2005).
The Imitation Game was set in England during the Second World War, with Knightley playing one of Alan Turing’s math sleuths seeking to crack the Nazis’ Enigma code. Her new film now in cinemas — James Kent’s The Aftermath, based on a bestselling novel by Rhidian Brook — is set in Hamburg immediately after the war; victorious Brits are trying to help Germans rebuild, but there are complications.
Knightley is Rachael, the wife of an emotionally withdrawn British colonel, played by Jason Clarke. Grieving the loss of her young son, and wondering if her husband cares about anything, Rachael finds herself drawn to a German widower, played by Alexander Skarsgard.
Rachael isn’t happy, but Knightley is delighted to be playing her, once more assaying a dramatic role of substance set in the time before today:
You’ve said that you prefer period films. Do you feel more comfortable in stories set in the past?
It’s not necessarily that, it’s more that they’re the most interesting characters that I’ve been offered … I also like the fact that you can make something like this, which actually seems very relevant, and yet there’s this kind of nice distance where you can kind of hide its relevancy, in a way, in this nice period veneer. It’s almost like a Trojan horse when you watch it because you suddenly sit down, you watch it, and you go, “F-kin’ hell, actually this is ringing a lot of bells to me right now!” I quite like that. The Aftermath takes a unique approach to the Second World War: Britons and Germans are living together in a house not long after these previously sworn enemies were locked in mortal combat. The story is based on historical fact, which I found surprising.
The script did the same to me. I’ve done a number of (Second World War) movies, and I’ve certainly seen many (wartime) movies and read a lot of books about the war. I knew absolutely nothing about this side of it. I thought it was really interesting how Germany and Europe were rebuilt after the war, and how people had come to terms with — and moved on from — what must have seemed at the time a kind of apocalypse. It’s really interesting that we’re taught in schools about this victory, but we’re not taught at all what the hell happens after a conflict.
It occurs to me that The Aftermath is really about forgiveness, on national, personal and emotional levels. Would you agree?
Yes, it is, absolutely, definitely. And I think that’s what I liked about it. Because you have the literal sense of enemies who are forgiving, but nobody comes off scot-free from it; everybody loses in a war. If you’ve lost somebody, it doesn’t matter if you were on the winning side, you still, in this case, lost your son. I’m sure you don’t feel like a victor. How do you get through that? I looked into grief a little bit and this kind of idea that men and women grieve differently — not always, but gener- ally. In what ways do men and women grieve differently?
A woman needs to talk about her grief. She needs to talk about the person that she’s lost, and how she’s lost them, and their life, almost to make sure that everybody knows that they did exist. A man needs to not talk about it. He needs to go and do something — maybe he needs to build a memorial garden or to do something at work where he can say, “That’s for this person.” And as a couple, if you’re doing that, and you need two completely different things, how on Earth do you bridge that kind of gulf between you? How on Earth does something like that not completely rip you apart, when literally you’ve got a guy who is so utterly terrified of his wife’s emotional landscape and needs to run away? That’s a kind of forgiveness there: trying to understand each other and understand the different needs, but be able to forgive and move forward. So I think you’re right: Forgiveness is a huge theme in the film. What do you make of Rachael? Is she selfish, or saving herself? She reminded me a bit of the title characters of two of your earlier films, Anna Karenina (2012) and Colette (2018).
I know what you mean ... Yes, there’s the tragic heroine, but I totally understood. I think that’s always my job. I like bringing out the shade in characters, and probably sometimes I’m a little too quick to bring out the damning side in them, but it’s always because I can find a reason for it. I don’t think that there’s anything that Rachel does in this film that I don’t understand, and I think that’s what I really liked about her. I went, “I can completely understand where you’re coming from, I can completely understand your rage. I can completely understand why you’re breaking apart, I can completely understand why you want to explode absolutely everything, and do sort of attempt to.” I totally get this. I’m not saying it’s right. I’m not saying you’re a saint for doing it. But human beings are messy, and they’re not logical. You were great in the musical comedy Begin Again (2013), but you are drawn back to drama time and again. What’s harder for you to do, comedy or drama?
I much prefer drama. It’s where my comfort zone is. Which probably means that I should probably try and break out of it!