Keira Knightley, who stars in the new film Colette, was a guest on the Hollywood Reporter’s “Awards Chatter” podcast recently, where she discussed her career trajectory in Hollywood — and the good and bad that came with her rise to fame.
After 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham, the teenage actress was catapulted to stardom, with the first film of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise launching the following year, along with her starring in the beloved movie Love Actually.
“That run of films was completely insane,” Knightley reflected. “It’s amazing looking back at it — from the outside you’re like, ‘Whoa, that was hit after hit after hit!’ you know, but from the inside, all you’re hearing is the criticism, really. And also, I was aware that I didn’t know what I was doing, you know? I didn’t know my trade, I didn’t know my craft. I knew that there was something that worked sometimes, but I didn’t know how to kind of capture that.”
Her personal life changed after Pirates as the blockbuster hit made her tabloid and paparazzi fodder. “I didn’t handle it well,” she explained. “It was a really rude awakening to the world of misogyny. … I’d never experienced that level of hatred on a day-to-day basis.”
Knightley detailed how paparazzi would scream at her, calling her a “whore,” in order to get a reactive photo that would sell. “It was big money to get pictures of women falling apart,” she said, noting that it was around the same time as Britney Spears’s breakdown and Amy Winehouse’s public struggles. Knightley said there were times she felt “worthless.” Still, she battled through it for about five years.
“There was a sense of, like, battle every day of, like, leaving the house,” she added. “I did have a mental breakdown at 22, you know, so I did take a year off there and was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder because of all of that stuff.”
After 2007’s Atonement, she took a year off to travel. “That gave me that space I needed to be able to start again,” she explained. “I felt pretty much like actually I sort of didn’t exist and I was this weird creature with this weird face that people seemed to respond to in quite an extreme way, and I couldn’t quite figure any of it out.”
Knightley credits her family with helping get her through the dark period. She also decided to take a step back from big-budget films, minus the Pirates franchise, and it’s been a journey to get where she is today.
“I look back and I just sort of want to give myself a hug and be like, ‘Oh, you’re doing all right, you’ll be all right,’” she said. “You know?”
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