Keira: I felt caged by being a sex object
IT was the swashbuckling blockbuster that helped kick start her glittering career in Hollywood.
But Keira Knightley says her turn as a sexy seafarer in the Pirates of the Caribbean - franchise left her feeling ‘caged’.
The British actress, who played Elizabeth Swann alongside Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom, said her role that began in 2003 film The Curse of the Black Pearl was at odds with her ‘tomboyish’ nature.
Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar, she said: : ‘She was the object of everybody’s lust. . Not that she doesn’t have a lot of fight in her. But it was interesting coming from being really tomboyish to getting projected as quite the opposite.’
Ms Knightley explained: ‘I felt very constrained. I felt very stuck. So the roles afterwards were about trying to break out of that. I didn’t have a sense of how to articulate it. It very much felt like I was caged in a thing I didn’t understand.’
Ms Knightley was in her late teens when she landed the role before going on to earn an Oscar nomination for Pride and Prejudice and a Bafta nod for Atonement in her early twenties.
She said she was ‘incredibly hard’ on herself and felt she was ‘never good enough’, but admitted she is now ‘in awe’ of the ‘utterly single-minded... ambitious’ and ‘driven’ woman she used to be.
‘I’d like a bit more of her back,’ the actress, 37, confessed.
Ms Knightley, whose other titles include Love Actually and Bend it Like Beckham, has struggled to juggle her career with being a mother to daughters Edie, seven, and Delilah, three, whom she has with husband, musician James Righton.
She said she needs multiple people to do the ‘exhausting’ work of one full-time parent when she is on set.
Ms Knightley is currently promoting The Boston Strangler, in which she plays Loretta McLaughlin, who, with fellow reporter Jean Cole, broke the story of the murderer who killed at least 11 women between 1962 and 1964.
The April issue of Harper’s Bazaar UK is on sale from tomorrow.