If you’ll pardon Keira Knightley for a minute, she needs a smoke. ”It’s really rude to do this,” she says in the middle of an interview on the rooftop of New York’s posh Gramercy Park Hotel. ”Would you mind terribly if I just went and got my cigarettes and came straight back?”
With that, she’s off for a few minutes to fetch some tobacco and papers. ”Are you smoking again?” asks her Atonement costar James McAvoy as she returns and starts rolling her own.
”I’m smoking because there were so many f—ing photographers outside,” she says. ”I thought, F— it — I’ll have a cigarette.”
Her lungs won’t get a break anytime soon. Neither Knightley nor McAvoy, who also got snapped by the photogs outside the hotel, can expect much privacy during the current Oscar season. Atonement — director Joe Wright’s heart-tugging, decades-spanning adaptation of Ian McEwan’s acclaimed 2002 novel — stands to become one of this year’s top Academy Award nominees, thanks to its epic story line, lush cinematography, and strong performances from Knightley (as upper-crust Cecilia Tallis) and McAvoy (as servant’s son Robbie Turner), both of whom earned Golden Globe nominations for the film. (And see our Oscar predictions, including the nominations we expect for Atonement.)
Of course, it’s not the first awards-season tour of duty for either of them. Two years ago, Knightley, 22, became one of the youngest Best Actress nominees ever with her performance in Pride & Prejudice (also directed by Wright), while McAvoy, 28, made the rounds last year as a costar of The Last King of Scotland, for which Forest Whitaker won the Best Actor prize. Over assorted vodka cocktails, the British starlet and her Scottish leading man discussed the politics of Oscar, their fights over the Atonement script, and their doozy of a sex scene.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Since so much of Atonement rides on the chemistry between the two of you, how nervous were you to shoot your big love scene?
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY: You have to believe that they will wait for each other for five years based on that one moment. So it had to be erotic, and it had to be passionate enough. We talked about it a lot. Most directors just go, ”Oh, you know what to do. Just get on with it.” Well, actually, I don’t know what to do. This is a relative stranger, and I’m in front of a group of strangers and I don’t know what to do. Joe was incredibly precise. He had storyboarded the whole thing: My foot coming out of my shoe, biting my lip at the end, the way my head turns — that was all completely him. And during it, because it was so close and it was on a Steadicam, we didn’t know what part of the body the shot was on. So Joe literally shouted [directions] out as we were doing it.
How close by was he?
JAMES MCAVOY: Five feet away? Four feet away? At one point, thinking that he was being very funny, he shouted, ”All right, Keira, next I want you to wank him off!” And nobody laughed.
KNIGHTLEY: No, because we thought that’s what he meant! I thought, Wait a minute. And then I heard this little voice go, ”Sorry!”
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So is the attraction we see on screen simply from Joe telling you what to do? Or does it also have to do with a real spark between the two of you?
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY: You’re right: Our job is to make sure that there’s chemistry. And if you’re working with somebody who you get on with, and you’re on the same page as far as where your characters are going emotionally, you will get it. However, you don’t always. Sometimes you can be with a really great actor that you really get on with, and for some reason, it’s cold.
JAMES MCAVOY: I’ve seen actors who really fancy each other and are indeed f—ing, and it’s rubbish.
KNIGHTLEY: In fact, a lot of directors say, ”Don’t f— each other” because it’ll ruin it.
Both of you say your favorite scene together is when you reunite over tea during the war.
MCAVOY: That was the scene that made me think, I can do this part. At one point it was dramatically altered.
KNIGHTLEY: Oh, that was awful! Remember? We nearly died!
How was the revised version different?
MCAVOY: It was made more emotive.
KNIGHTLEY: It was a different writer, and it was a perfectly well-written scene, but just not what made sense with the rest of [the film].
MCAVOY: The characters would explain how they feel. If they were angry, they were telling them that they were angry. Before we started rehearsal, Joe phoned me up and went, ”I just wanted to know what you think of the new scene.” And I said, ”Joe, do you want me to be honest? I’m devastated. One of the scenes that made me feel like I had a connection to the script is now irrevocably gone.”
So did you win the battle?
MCAVOY: It took a few weeks, but Joe ultimately put it back. But not just because we wanted to.
The plot of the film is set in motion by a provocative letter Robbie accidentally delivers to Cecilia. James, a few months ago you told me you don’t think the letter is vulgar, even though it contains the C-word. What do you think, Keira?
KNIGHTLEY: I completely agree. What’s wonderful about it is that you set this piece up that you think is very safely 1930s — it’s a very beautiful, very classic British film, wonderful costumes, the rest of it. And then you put the word c— into it. And it completely explodes. I think in England it’s not as big a deal as it is in America. I say it all the time.
MCAVOY: We call each other it all the time! But you’ve got to remember, it’s not said in the film. It’s only ever typed.
KNIGHTLEY: Nobody’s been outraged by it. And I actually thought that they would. I know that Joe was asked by the studio at some point to take the word out, clearly because they thought that people would get really offended by it. And Joe said the immortal words, ”The c—stays in the picture!”
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What on earth could you have replaced it with?
JAMES MCAVOY: ”Your lady garden”?
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY: We were trying to come up with that. No idea.
MCAVOY: Can you imagine? ”Every night I go to bed and I dream about your…noo-noo”?
KNIGHTLEY: We had big conversations about whether they’d actually ever ”done it” before. Joe thought that Cecilia would have been a virgin. We actually got a historical adviser in and asked her. And she said she probably wasn’t, since she’d gone away to university. And it kind of destroyed Joe for a minute or two. He couldn’t take it at all. He was really upset. I said, ”She can be a virgin if you want her to be!”
James, is it true that Joe Wright has offered you a part in every project he’s done and you’ve always turned him down?
MCAVOY: In TV he’d offered me stuff a couple times. At one point he got quite annoyed with me.
Were you worried he would hold that against you when you read for Atonement?
MCAVOY: That was in the back of my head. But that’s just my own paranoia.
KNIGHTLEY: It does happen. But I have to say, he did one of the most extraordinary screen tests I’ve ever seen in my entire life. And it was on a day where really good actors had been up for the role. Joe had a specific physical type that he wanted, and it wasn’t necessarily James. But he came in and it was such an extraordinary reading that we were all completely silent for 10 minutes afterward.
MCAVOY: Joe said to me after the screen test, ”That was good, mate — we’ll see how things go.” He couldn’t say yes; he’s not allowed to. But he said, ”Read the book.” And I just went, ”No way! Give me the f—ing part and I’ll read the book!”
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Between this and next summer’s action thriller Wanted with Angelina Jolie, you’re really about to take off, James. Whereas Keira’s already been through this kind of sudden fame.
JAMES MCAVOY: Having worked with Keira and having recently worked with Angelina Jolie as well, I know I’ll never get to the point, frankly, where people will run across freeways to take a picture of me. It’s a different thing for women.
Both of you have also been through the Oscar-season process before. What was it like for you?
KEIRA KNIGHTLEY: For me it was the first time that anyone said that I could remotely act. So going from just a pretty face who’s s— to somebody being nominated for an Oscar was hilarious! And also I knew that I hadn’t got a f—ing hope in hell of actually winning it, so it took the pressure off. But I never read a script and go, ”Ooh, that could be an Oscar.”
I’m sure some people do.
MCAVOY: Agents do. Last King of Scotland was kicking about for eight years before it got made. And there was always this perceived opinion that whoever played that part was getting an Oscar-winning part. It was always deemed as an ”Oscar script.” I know that that wasn’t in any way a consideration for Forest Whitaker, but I know that had he not won Best Actor, there would have been people in the industry who would have considered it a failure. And that’s f—ing ridiculous. There were people connected to the film that were aiming for that from the moment he was cast.
So now that you’ve essentially completed your international press tour for this film, what would you say is the one question you’ve each gotten the most?
MCAVOY: [Affecting an American accent] ”Could you, uh, just talk about the five-minute tracking shot? Was that all one shot?”
KNIGHTLEY: I’ve had ”Why are you only good in Joe Wright films?”
In those exact words?
KNIGHTLEY: No, okay, maybe not those words. But pretty much. ”Would you agree that you have done your best work…” You know, that kind of thing. ”Why are you so s— in everything else?”
MCAVOY: And I’ve been asked to grade your kissing ability.
KNIGHTLEY: That was my fault. I got asked for the 20 millionth time who was the better kisser between Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom, and I thought I’d be really clever and say ”James McAvoy. Ha ha ha!” And now every single one is going, ”So James is a better kisser than Johnny and Orlando?”
MCAVOY: [Again with an American accent] ”So, James, I hear that you’re better than Johnny Depp! Do you care to say anything about that?” And I just go, ”Yeah, you know, I’ll f—in’ kick his head in.”
KNIGHTLEY: Brilliant!