Keira Knightley has better reasons not to think about the “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise than their association with Johnny Depp. With the release of the first film she was 18 and Knightley still remembers the pressure she faced with its success.
“It’s a funny thing when you have something that was making and breaking you at the same time,” she said in a recent interview with The Times of London. “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.”
Knightley has ruled out participating in a franchise like that again, adding, “The hours are insane. It’s years of your life, you have no control over where you’re filming, how long you’re filming, what you’re filming.”
Knightley remembers having to guard herself after the film’s release. Even though she was exposed to the high life, she knew she couldn’t really revel in it for fear of how it might turn into a story.
“I 100 percent recognized and saw people’s careers being shattered because they were photographed coming out of clubs,” said Knightley. “The money on my head at that point, if you’d got a picture of me drunk, was so huge. I wasn’t going to give the [paparazzi] the satisfaction of taking that away, so I was unbelievably straight.”
Knightley has shared her feelings towards the “Pirates” franchise in the past. In 2023, during an interview with Harper’s Bazaar U.K., she acknowledged how they held her back in many ways, having been exposed to something so huge at such a young age.
“I felt very constrained. I felt very stuck. So the roles afterwards were about trying to break out of that,” Knightley said. “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.”
Knightly next appears on the Netflix limited series thriller “Black Doves” alongside Ben Whishaw. The show is featured on IndieWire’s December TV Preview, as well as our Winter 2024 Preview.
“Black Doves” streams on Netflix on December 5.
