This came as part of a larger conversation about playing Elizabeth Swan in the original Pirates films, which Knightley began shooting when she was only 17 years old. In the way the media always does (but was especially inclined towards in 2003 when the film premiered), the speculation over her body—specifically whether or not she was suffering from an eating disorder—began almost immediately. Now, “in that classic trauma way I don’t remember it,” she said of the constant ridicule. “There’s been a complete delete, and then some things will come up and I’ll suddenly have a very bodily memory of it because, ultimately, it’s public shaming, isn’t it? It’s obviously part of my psyche, given how young I was when it happened. I’ve been made around it.”
That whole situation left Knightley in a complicated relationship with the thing that launched her career, one that indirectly led to the excellent films mentioned above. “It’s a funny thing when you have something that was making and breaking you at the same time,” she continued. “I was seen as shit because of them, and yet because they did so well I was given the opportunity to do the films that I ended up getting Oscar nominations for. They were the most successful films I’ll ever be a part of and they were the reason that I was taken down publicly. So they’re a very confused place in my head.”
In a 2023 interview with Harper’s Bazaar UK, Knightley also recalled feeling “very stuck” and “constrained” after her big breakout role. It was interesting coming from being really tomboyish to getting projected as quite the opposite,” she said. “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.”
Knightley will next appear in the Netflix spy thriller Black Doves, in which her character “embarks on a passionate affair with a man who has no idea what her secret identity is.” The series premieres December 5.
