KEIRA ON USING Knightley says her new movie is a woman’s view of the end of the world
KEIRA Knightley has revealed how she used her own fears as a mum in her latest film. The 36-year-old is best known for playing prim and posh characters in movies such as Love Actually, the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and Atonement.
Her new film, Silent Night, starts off like an upper-class romcom but is actually a very dark thriller about the end of the world which was filmed when the real-life Covid pandemic was changing the world.
Keira, who is married to musician James Righton, was pregnant with their second child when she read the script.
She said: “It really fed into this idea of the maternal catastrophe. When you give birth to a child, you give birth to life and also fear like you have never experienced before.
“It’s when you give way to what ifs – like, ‘What if the worst happens?’ I think this is a very maternal fear that happens with a lot of new parents, new mothers especially. That really struck a chord with me.
“Maternity is one of the parts of female storytelling that is still quite taboo, particularly the darker sides of maternity.”
The production – which also stars Matthew Goode, Lily-Rose Depp and Rufus Jones – was nearing completion when the pandemic began to break out around the world and fiction suddenly began to feel like fact.
Keira added: “We were in this incredibly strange moment where the pandemic was rolling in. Suddenly this thing that was very funny, that wouldn’t ever really happen, is very real.
“The last thing we filmed was the death sequence and we were the last movie still shooting in London before everything shut
down.
“We were filming ourselves dying while there was panic on the streets and everybody was hoarding toilet paper. That was one of the most surreal experiences I’ve had on any film.”
In the last few days of filming, as the world began to start panicking, they were wondering if they should still be shooting. She said: “We’d been talking about bottled water running out but had never considered there not being toilet roll and being unable to get pasta anywhere.” While Silent Night wasn’t
made about Covid, because of the virus much of what viewers will take from it will be marked by their own experiences of living through lockdowns and loss of loved ones.
Keira said: “I think it should come with a warning and I haven’t felt like that before. What we’ve all been through with the pandemic is not a situation any of us thought we’d have to understand – even as we were making this, it wasn’t.
“Then it was suddenly a situation that felt like it could happen and all of our relationships changed because of that.
“If this film had been released five years ago, the audience would have a completely different reaction to it than now.”
Usually with disaster movies an action hero will save his family or try and fight what’s going on. Silent Night is different and Keira thinks it is more of a female look at the end of the world.
She said: “It’s not about people running or trying to fight it, it’s about sitting in that moment and trying desperately to make it OK for the kids but making it 10 times worse. It’s an incredibly uniquely female perspective and very exciting from that point of view.”
When Keira read the script, she was six months pregnant, had sciatica and thought the script was the most hilarious thing she had ever read.
She met director Camille Griffin six weeks after she’d given birth, was still hormonal and still thought the film was a comedy.
Keira said: “Then we came to film it, my kid was five months old and sleeping through the night so I wasn’t hormonal anymore. I read the script again and I was like, ‘What is this? This is the most f ***** up thing I have ever read in my life.’”
Silent Night is Four Weddings and a Funeral without any marriages and lots of death.
A giant toxic cloud caused by environmental abuse is forecast to sweep in on Boxing Day killing everyone. A group of posh professionals who have known each other since school decide to have a last Christmas hurrah at a country house.
Keira plays hostess Nell, who is married to Matthew Goode’s Simon. They have three boys. Also at the end-of-days dinner party are Nell’s sister Sandra (Annabelle Wallis) and husband Tony (Rufus Jones), hospital consultant James (Sope Dirisu), his partner Sophie (Lily-Rose Depp), Bella (Lucy Punch) and her partner Alex (Kirby Howell-Baptiste).
The actress, whose mum is Glaswegian playwright Sharman Macdonald, knows people think she’s usually in historical movies but she’s half of her output is in contemporary films – they just aren’t remembered as much.
She said: “Love Actually has done very well but some of them haven’t done as well as others.
“I think predominantly it has something to do with my face. I get cast in period films more than contemporary films. The roles in period films have been more interesting. I don’t know why that is.
“I’m just happy to play characters I find inspiring, interesting and complex. That’s what I am looking for.”
Keira was 20 when she was Oscar-nominated for playing Elizabeth Bennent is 2005 period romance Pride & Prejudice and was given an Academy Award nod again in 2014’s The Imitation Game.
She said: “Pride & Prejudice meant so much as it was a book I’d been obsessed with since I was a very small child. I had a dolls house that was Pemberley. I had it on tape, would listen to it constantly and my mum read the book to me. I was obsessed with that book. To actually be able to play her, and for the film to do phenomenally well,was amazing.”
Her first film role was as Sabe, Padme Amidala’s handmaiden in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phanton Menace. She followed it with her big break as Jules, a toyboy footballer in Bend it Like Beckham.
She hopes she can star in a sci-fi film in the future and admitted: “I’m always looking for sci-fi but it would have to be good, weird sci-fi.”
Silent Night is out in cinemas today and will be available to stream from Monday.