After Pirates of the Caribbean, Keira Knightley desperately wanted to do some sword fighting – and was rewarded with a role as the battle-hardened Guinevere in King Arthur. She talks to John Hiscock about her meteoric rise
She has been hailed as Hollywood’s newest star and described in one national American magazine as “the most beautiful British import since Elizabeth Taylor”. Yet it would be difficult to find anyone less “Hollywood” than Keira Knightley.
While conversations in Los Angeles acting circles tend to centre on scripts, agents and the latest hot night spots, the London-born teenager would far rather talk about West Ham’s prospects of promotion (she is optimistic) and David Beckham’s penalty misses (sympathetic).
She also displays a 19-year-old’s scornful attitude to the health- and fitness-obsessed culture of California and a disdain for the aerobics, Pilates and workout regimes that rule the lives of many of her contemporaries.
When we meet in a Los Angeles hotel, she has just demolished a breakfast of bagels and cream cheese – “I don’t think it constitutes a good diet but it tastes good,” she giggles. “I don’t think about nutrition. The very thought of a diet makes me want chips and ice cream. And I just hate going to the gym. I cannot stand it.”
Knightley is refreshingly down to earth in a very British way. There is a casual openness about her which is reflected in her raucous laugh and the apparent difficulty she has in taking anything, particularly herself, too seriously.
Since she first became known to a worldwide audience two years ago as the leggy, football-mad Jules in Bend It Like Beckham – shot when she was only 16 – her career has soared at an astonishing pace. She starred in the racy television adaptation of Doctor Zhivago, was chosen by producer Jerry Bruckheimer as the female lead in his Pirates of the Caribbean and recently reteamed with him for the broadswords-and-breastplates epic King Arthur, which opens here at the end of the month.
So luminous is her performance as the blue-painted, skimpily clad warrior queen Guinevere that Disney has made her the focal point of its advertising campaign for the film. Her image dominates the posters, trailers and television commercials and she is also gracing the covers of America’s Vanity Fair, Entertainment Weekly and Premiere. All heady stuff for a teenage girl who was still at school last year.
Clive Owen, who plays King Arthur, says of her: “It would be easy to go crazy at her age with everything that has happened to her so quickly, yet she is the most grounded girl you could wish to meet.”
She was certainly unbothered by the love scene she shares with Owen, more than twice her age, in which Guinevere enters Arthur’s tent for sex. “It was part of the job,” she says. “There’s no point in being embarrassed about it because that is the name of the game. It was just another day at the office.” Then she adds with a saucy smile: “A very nice day at the office.”
Her long, dark hair hangs in a fringe on her forehead – “I’ve got spots and the fringe hides the spots,” she explains with a rare honesty – and she is wearing a midriff-baring T-shirt and black trousers.
Traffic around the hotel is jammed because Bill Clinton is signing copies of his autobiography at a nearby bookshop, but Knightley is more concerned with England’s loss to Portugal in Euro 2004, which she watched on television in Los Angeles via satellite. “As soon as the game went to penalties I knew we weren’t going to win,” she says. “We never win on penalties. I felt very sorry for David Beckham, though. He kicked that ball so high in the air I don’t think it’s come down yet.”
Jerry Bruckheimer claims his King Arthur is the definitive story of the legendary half-Roman, half-British warrior Artorius Castus who, with his band of knights, emerged to lead the Britons against the advancing Saxon forces. Historians will find much to dispute in Hollywood’s retelling of the legend, but Knightley dismisses any possible criticism with a shrug. “I thought it was an interesting take on the story,” she says. “The fact that we haven’t focused on the love triangle between Arthur, Lancelot and Guinevere was actually one of the things that made me want to do the film. It’s interesting to tell it in a completely new way.”
She concedes, however, that the film may not be strictly accurate. “Historically, the Picts and the Celts fought in the nude, but there was no way I was going to do that,” she says. “It would have been much too distracting.”
To prepare for playing the manipulative, calculating and battled-hardened Guinevere, Knightley had to spend three months at what she calls “knights’ boot camp”, learning sword-fighting, horse-riding and how to look fierce in battle, all of which she loved. She also had to spend hours in the gym building up her muscles, which she hated but which proved worthwhile.
“Maybe it’s the tomboy in me,” she says. “I had a fantastic time. I’d wanted to get stuck into the action on Pirates of the Caribbean and I asked Jerry if I could have a sword fight in that, and he more than made up for it in King Arthur by giving me axe fights, knife fights and all the rest of it. I absolutely loved it. It was like being 11 years old and in the playground again.”
Now she has lost her hard-earned muscles and reverted to her normal shape, the actress has moved on to other projects. She has filmed a hair commercial for Japanese television, has just finished The Jacket, in which she plays an alcoholic American waitress with Oscar-winner Adrien Brody, is due to begin work shortly on Pride and Prejudice which, she says, “will not be particularly faithful” to Jane Austen’s book, and there is the possibility of a Pirates of the Caribbean sequel.
While other girls her age would kill for a love scene with Orlando Bloom or the chance to work in exotic locations, Knightley takes it in her stride. With one exception: there is one man, she says, who can make her go weak at the knees and act like a star-struck fan.
“George Clooney,” she says. “He’s the one.” She met the former ER star briefly in Ireland on the set of The Jacket, which he is producing, but she fears she did not make much of an impression. “He was only there for one day and I managed to say ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’,” she recalls. “People were digging me in the ribs telling me to say something, but I just couldn’t. He’s the one I completely fall apart over.” Keira Knightley
Although international fame has struck quickly, Knightley is a seasoned actress. Born in Teddington to playwright Sharman Macdonald and actor Will Knightley, she was three when she first asked her parents for an agent. She finally got one when she was six, as a reward for working hard to conquer a reading disability.
“When I was six they found that I couldn’t read at all, so my mum said, ‘If you come to me with a book in your hand and a smile on your face all through the summer holidays, then at the end of it I’ll get you an agent’,” she recalls. “So I did that and got an agent and then the school said I could only act if I kept my grades up, so Mum and Dad spent quite a lot of money on tutors. My mum tutored me in English and history and we worked very hard and by the time I was 11 I had conquered it and since then it’s never been a problem.”
Keira’s first major role came when she was nine in the romantic feature film A Village Affair and she appeared in a succession of film and television parts before being cast at the age of 14 as the decoy queen Sabe alongside Natalie Portman in Star Wars: Episode One – The Phantom Menace. Then came Bend it Like Beckham, followed quickly by the female lead in Pirates of the Caribbean, a cameo role in Love Actually, and King Arthur.
She is enjoying her nomadic existence, moving between film locations and living half her life in hotels and rented apartments, although she could do with more free time to attend to her personal life. She does not talk about boyfriends but has recently been linked with Jamie Dornan, an Irish model she met while filming The Jacket. She has just bought a home of her own not too far from her parents’ house in Richmond but has not yet had a chance to move in.
Her sudden fame has not affected her home life much yet, although she is beginning to notice that some things are changing.
“I haven’t stopped working, so I haven’t had time to take a step back and assess things,” she says. “Obviously there are differences now: getting on the bus is becoming a little difficult, but I’ll work through that. It’s also strange when people recognise you in the street and they know you but you don’t know them. It’s a little weird, but nothing to complain about.”
Keira Knightley is the sort of person who rarely finds anything to complain about – unless it’s West Ham’s failure to return to the Premiership.
