Keira Knightley talks life and love
The Aftermath star on life, love and finding great roles
It’s like Marie Antoinette in here,” remarks Keira Knightley, breezing into a plush room at The Dorchester. She plonks down on a sofa beneath a beige canopy, ginger tea in hand.
The two-time Oscar nominee,
who came to fame in Bend It Like
Beckham in 2002, does not hold back. We first met for the 2004
psychological thriller The Jacket, when she was an 18-year-old in the eye of a Hollywood hurricane: roles in
Pirates of the Caribbean, Love Actually
and King Arthur had brought the fame monster to her door. She seemed confident back then. “I’ve always had a way that’s made me appear confident. I was sometimes a shivering wreck on the floor. But I knew at that point that I didn’t know what I was doing. I knew I had a good instinct and I had enough confidence to know I got some good parts. But I didn’t know my craft.”
The daughter of the English actor Will Knightley and the Scottish actress-playwright Sharman Macdonald, Knightley was raised in Teddington, got an agent aged six and began auditioning for commercials and TV. Eight years later, she was cast as Natalie Portman’s decoy in 1999 Star Wars prequel The Phantom Menace ,but was “learning on the job” from the off. “I’d never been to drama school, I’d never had an acting lesson. I’d never had an acting teacher.”
She recently admitted that criticism of her performances needled her – even after winning an Oscar nod for her work as Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright’s 2005 Jane Austen adaptation Pride & Prejudice. “I felt I was worthless.” Hounded by the paparazzi, and faced with persistent comments about her weight, Knightley suffered a breakdown at 22, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress.
It took a year of “deep therapy” before she returned with a newfound resilience. After a second Oscar nomination for The Imitation Game, she is now in a creative sweet spot. The 33-year-old has just starred in the vibrant Colette, in which she played the bisexual French writer, and this week, she is back in post-second World War tale The Aftermath. A romantic drama in the mould of
Atonement – the 2007 Ian Mcewan adaptation that won Knightley nominations at the Golden Globes and Baftas – The Aftermath sees her play Rachael, wife to a British army colonel. Traumatised by the loss of her son to a German bomb, her grief is compounded when she and her husband are relocated to Hamburg, sharing their accommodation with the German aristocrat, Stefan Lubert, who previously owned the house (Alexander Skarsgärd).
Rachael is cold and complex, filled with what Knightley calls “female rage”, and utterly torn. “I think she’s racist, arguably understandably, because she blames every single German for the death of her son. Of course she does: she’d been trained to. But also because it was a German bomb that dropped on her house, and a bomb falling from the sky is faceless.” Knightley recently shot
Misbehaviour, a true story, in which a group of women disrupt the 1970 Miss World competition. It feels she has been party to a wealth of female- driven stories – is that the case? “Not many are coming my way,” she says, surprisingly. “It’s a struggle. There are a lot of great actresses and everybody is looking for the interesting stuff.”
Nevertheless, in the wake of #Metoo, and the call for equal pay and more female-oriented projects, has she sensed a sea change? “Yeah. Right now, in this specific moment. The film festivals are being held accountable by journalists asking, ‘What’s your list? How many [femaledirected films] are there?’ It helps. There is a big push, and I know because I’m getting phone calls going, ‘And we’re looking for a female director.’ That would never have happened three years ago.”
Knightley is not naïve enough to think the job is done. Is she worried it will be a fad? “Of course. I think everyone is. There is only going to be proper change if audiences get behind it, if these films are commercially viable.”
Last year, the actress wrote an essay, “The Weaker Sex”, for the collection
Feminists Don’t Wear Pink and Other Lies, which graphically recounted the birth of her daughter Edie, now three years old. It described the pain and the unrealistic expectations placed on women to look perfect – not least the Duchess of Cambridge, who gave birth to her daughter Charlotte the day after Knightley’s child arrived. “She was out of hospital seven hours later with her face made up and high heels on.”
Knightley also tackled sexism and hypocrisy on set – not least the way male colleagues can turn up late while she struggled to get there on time, exhausted by the rigours of early-years parenting. On the forthcoming Official Secrets – in which she plays GCHQ whistleblower Katharine Gun – she was at breaking point. “It was extreme,” she says. “It’s not easy for any parent who is dealing with their children at night and also holding down a job.”
It is rare to hear such frankness from an A-list star. What gave her the courage to write? “It’s awful,” she blushes. “I’ve got a ‘F*** it’ button. Sometimes it gets pushed. I thought, ‘Well, they’ll probably turn it down. It’s a bit much, but if they want it they can have it.’”
Then she showed it to James Righton, her musician husband of almost six years. “It starts with ‘My vagina split’ and he went, ‘Oh, for f***’s sake, do you have to?’ I said, ‘Read on.’ He read it and he said, ‘Oh God, I didn’t know. I just didn’t know.’ I thought, ‘You’re my husband, how did you not know?’
But once he said that, I thought, ‘That’s a good reason [to send the essay],’ because if the person who is right next to me didn’t know, maybe it’s something that needs to be communicated a bit.”
Former Klaxons member Righton has moved into soundtracks, with
Benjamin, written and directed by Simon Amstell, due out two weeks after The Aftermath. Could she and he ever collaborate? She did, after all, play a singer in Begin Again. “Oh, no, we’d kill each other! God no. He occasionally makes me clap on something because he can’t find anyone else to do it.” Like Bez from the Happy Mondays? “Yeah,” she grins. “I’m his Bez.”
The Aftermath (15) is out now