Can I get you something?” says Marcus the Genteel Bodyguard, shaking my comparatively dinky little mitt in his gigantic paw, then lumbering up to the bar to fetch me a Coke. For the past three and a half years, Marcus, who gives the impression of being eight feet tall, has made his living intimidating, and if need be, pummeling any stranger who’d lay a finger on Keira Knightley. (Before that, he provided the same service for another petite British beauty—Jude Law.) Though Marcus’ shaved head might sit atop a neck the circumference of a Christmas ham, he’s no bruiser meathead, something I’d already intuited from his e-mail describing the location he’d chosen for my interview: “an amazing pub (very quiet in the day) dating back to 1725 and mentioned in some of Charles Dickens’ works.”
“Lovely” is the way Marcus describes his boss as he sits with me at the Boot, the London pub he selected, while waiting for Knightley. Marcus exemplifies what we Americans fancy all British society to be: polite, hyper-civilized, from a land where even the less posh are adorably quirky in that Full Monty who-knew- rugged- steelworkers-could-shake-their-moneymakers kind of way. So it’s surprising to learn that no city is more hassle-ridden and impolite to Knightley than London, the one she calls home. A couple of years ago, an unaccompanied Knightley was confronted by an unhinged admirer who, when she wasn’t sufficiently receptive, started shouting, “Who the fuck do you think you fucking are?” And the paparazzi, Marcus says, are “far more devious here” than in the States; even in rural Shropshire, where some of Atonement was shot, he would accompany the groundskeeper and his hounds at night to patrol the 14,000-acre estate, where invariably they’d discover photographers with long lenses ensconced in trees. It’s no wonder Marcus excuses himself to escort Knightley from the rehearsal space where she’s preparing for her stage debut in the West End production of The Misanthrope, even if it’s only a few steps away.
The barman, perhaps sensing that something is afoot, checks in with me, the Boot’s sole afternoon customer. The compact 27-yearold Australian tells me his name is Grant Houghton. He’s sporting a snug Oscar the Grouch T-shirt. Despite an autographed photo of Lee Majors hanging above my head (“Have a pint for me,” Majors signed), the Boot doesn’t appear to be a celebrity haunt, at least not since before The Fall Guy was on the air, and Houghton seems concurrently giddy and queasy to learn that any minute Knightley will walk through the door. “Oh my God,” he says, mouth agape, noggin shaking, all but pinching himself. “I’m nervous now. She’s a goddess!”
A minute later, said goddess alights from Olympus in diaphanous flowing robes—well, she comes in from outdoors, actually, and she’s in a floppy black beret, jeans, and motorcycle boots, though she is surrounded by a divine cloud of good smells that I correctly guess is Chanel Coco Mademoiselle, the one product Knightley lends her face and nearly naked body to advertise. “Really, are you sure?” she replies to the compliment on her scent. She buries her nose in her armpit. “I’ve been sweating all morning,” she says, taking a deep sniff. “It’s good that you’re over there and not right here.” Deflecting a compliment with a BO riff is typical of Knightley; I interviewed her a few years ago and found her to be almost pathologically unwilling to acknowledge anything positive about either her looks or talent. Instead, she spoke at length about her compulsion to squeeze zits, professed to having a dumpier ass than she’d like, and expressed an inability to watch her own work without cringing. This even went for Pride & Prejudice, which by then had earned her an Oscar nomination and silenced most who had deemed her a middling talent attached to a very pretty face.
No question, Knightley indeed possesses a very pretty face, though I can see less of it today, thanks to her long chestnut brown hair. “I’ve been growing my hair because nobody’s asked me to cut it,” she explains. “I normally only cut it for jobs.” Knightley, who’d been working nonstop since her breakout in Bend It Like Beckham at 17, took the better part of 2008 off, doing “lots of stuff that I luckily don’t have to give interviews about.” (Though she refuses to even utter her boyfriend’s name, a chunk of that year was spent in Paris with Rupert Friend, the angularly handsome British actor she met on Pride & Prejudice, who was in France filming the title role of Stephen Frears’ Cheri.) Last year, she got back to work on two projects coming out soon: an adaptation of novelist Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and The Departed screenwriter William Monahan’s directing debut, London Boulevard.
Pirates of the Caribbean, however, is finally in her rearview mirror; though Johnny Depp will likely reprise his role as Captain Jack Sparrow—for a rumored record-breaking paycheck that’s upward of $30 million—Knightley says that neither Jerry Bruckheimer nor anyone else has asked her about coming back, which suits her fine. “I can’t imagine playing that character again,” she says of Elizabeth Swann. Murky is the future of her My Fair Lady remake. Last year, producer Cameron Mackintosh crowed to the press that he’d found his perfect Eliza Doolittle by pitting a British actress (Knightley, it turned out) against an American (presumably Scarlett Johansson), but with a director yet to be hired at press time, Knightley seems not to know if the film is actually happening.
Now, in just a few weeks, she’ll take the stage in The Misanthrope, which playwright Martin Crimp has translated and contemporized from Molière’s seventeenth-century comedy—couplets re-rhymed, F-words peppered liberally—and which will run through March. Ironically, though the play is set in London, Knightley portrays its sole American, a young, beautiful, spoiled film actress who’s sleeping with the misanthrope of the title and possibly most of the other dramatis personae, male and female. “Jennifer’s kind of a crazy mix of being a complete bitch—confident and terrifying—yet she’s incredibly young and is probably being exploited way more than she actually realizes,” says Knightley, who’s too polite to name the Hollywood hellcats who’ve informed her portrayal.
Today Knightley and actress Tara Fitzgerald have been rehearsing what she calls the “bitch fight” of the third act. For Knightley, it’s a subversive gambit; she, a 24-year-old bona fide movie star, will be verbally crucified by Marcia, an older actress who in a few surgically precise monologues lays out everything that is insufferable and morally bankrupt about young beautiful movie stars and their sellout ways. So, I inquire, which character in the show speaks to you most? “I agree with a lot of what Marcia says, which is quite strange,” Knightley says. “I don’t think you can be a woman in this position without having thought from that point of view.” She pulls out her script and scans the pages for an exemplary bit. “Here!” she says, and begins reading: “Can’t you see you’ve been sucked into the publicity machine and spat out as pure product? Are you really so completely mind-fucked as to think there’s some connection between your fame and your own ability? No, you’re just a brand of femininity to be sold. Your face is just one more image in the marketplace, and your body is pure commodity.”
She looks up at me meaningfully, as if to say, “Case closed.” Even after the plaudits for Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, I ask, you’re still worried about your fame outpacing your talent? “I don’t know,” she says wearily. “I don’t know.”
But you know that by this point the whole Keira-Knightleycan’t- act business has been put to rest, right? “Oh, they still say that!” she says. “Every time I do an interview with the English press, one of their questions is, ‘How do you feel knowing that everyone thinks you’re a shit actress?’ ”
To my ears, this sounds like crazy talk, some sort of self-effacing English shtick. In America, Knightley hasn’t done enough films to make her “beloved,” but she’s certainly admired and respected. Her growth as an actress suggests an ability to ease into the type of roles now offered to Kate Winslet and Cate Blanchett, the pair who bring a patina of quality to every project. Many wealthy actresses might say, as Knightley tells me, “I don’t like shopping,” but she actually seems to mean it; in every recent photo I’ve seen, Knightley’s wearing the same top she has on now—a blue sweater with thin white stripes and oversize pearl-colored buttons on the shoulder. (“I know exactly the jumper you mean,” says The Misanthrope’s director, Thea Sharrock. “And I think she probably only has three pairs of jeans, and I’ve seen them all. And I could spot her boots a mile off.”) And though she never really dishes in interviews, the American press adores her because she’s fun company, a woman with a gift for verbal sparring that came from growing up with two opinionated theater people—her dad, journeyman stage and TV actor Will Knightley, and mom, actress-turned-playwright Sharman Macdonald—along with friends who sat at her parents’ dinner table, such as the droll actor Alan Rickman and multihyphenate smarty-pants Simon Callow. I once asked another writer who’d interviewed scads of actresses if he ever found himself falling in love, mid-interview, with one: “Only Keira,” he sighed moonily. Who can resist this chick?
Britain, it seems.
Ten days before The Misanthrope opens, the UK’s large-circulation broadsheet The Daily Telegraph publishes an interview with Sharrock, who talks about the coup of getting hometown girl Knightley onstage (Knightley agreed to take second billing to a relatively unknown actor, Damian Lewis), a casting decision that reportedly helped bring roughly $1,630,000 of advance ticket sales to the recession-battered West End. Alongside this article, a leggy former gossip columnist named Celia Walden (who dates America’s Got Talent’s resident Simon Cowell impersonator, Piers Morgan) “analyses Keira Knightley’s appeal,” concluding that women are jealous. For what, it’s hard to say, since Walden lists lesser-known British actresses she deems more talented than Knightley, attributes her success largely to good costumes, casting, and production values, and claims men don’t lust after her because “there is something too poised, too static about her face—and not enough vulgarity in that angular body.” It’s a cruel piece, tacky and disingenuous. Were all those lined-up theatergoers planning to smuggle tomatoes into the Comedy Theatre to hurl when Knightley appears?
Picking up the paper, Sharrock was dismayed but not surprised. “Keira told me that she’s been hit by an amazing amount of this sort of thing,” she says. Sharrock also directed Daniel Radcliffe’s West End performance in Equus, which, despite some adolescent sniggering about his extended nude scene, the press received warmly. “I certainly didn’t come across this with Daniel,” she says. “They’re a million miles from each other in many ways, but I have to think it has something to do with the fact that he’s a young man and she’s a young woman.”
In 2007, the Daily Mail illustrated a story concerning a 19-yearold’s death from anorexia with a picture of Knightley in a bikini along with the headline, “If pictures like this one of Keira carried a health warning, my darling daughter might have lived.” Knightley, who’s always been naturally gangly and had, ad nauseam, told the press that, yes, ectomorphs do exist and she happens to be one, successfully sued the paper for implying that she’d lied about her eating habits and bore partial responsibility for the girl’s death. “One of the things I love most about Keira,” says Joe Wright, director of Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, “is that she’ll play the game to a certain point and play it no further. She doesn’t pander to the press in the way I’m sure they’d like. So sometimes they’re even meaner to her than others.”
Knightley has the good fortune—or lousy luck—to be surrounded by people who tell her the unvarnished truth, most of whom happen to be British. Her parents, for one, never withhold criticism of her projects and performances. “You have to be selective about the people whose advice and opinions you take,” Knightley says. “I know [my parents] would never tell me I was shit because they were trying to hurt me. It would always come from a very sincere place.” These are the words she heard at a meeting with director John Maybury before he cast her in his 2005 film, The Jacket: “I just want you to know, I don’t want you to get this part,” he told her, noting that his producers had forced him to take the meeting. “I don’t think you can act.” (Maybury directed her again in 2008’s The Edge of Love from a script written by Knightley’s mom.)
“Joe’s another one who’s very honest with me,” Knightley says of Wright. “With Pride & Prejudice he’d always be saying, ‘Close your mouth and stop pouting!’ ” Ah, the pout, which got quite a bit of screen time in the first Pirates movie. I beg Knightley to do it for me; she demurs. “I’m not going to do it,” she says firmly, understandable given that her critics have long griped that it betrays a kind of vanity. Wright, who’s never shy about expressing his issues with Knightley’s mouth, sees her downturned lips as anything but an attempt at sexy-mirror-face. “She’s got this mouth that very easily can look like it’s pouting even if it’s not,” he says. “But I find that all actors have a tic, something they do unconsciously when they’re unsure of what they’re doing. I try to find that tic and get rid of it because it often signifies a kind of tension.”
Knightley’s friend, screenwriter and director Massy Tadjedin, who cast her in the upcoming film Last Night, says Knightley seems to battle a true self-consciousness. “There was a sequence in which I wanted her to look directly at the camera,” Tadjedin says. “That is like asking her to stick her finger in burning water. She just has an aversion to the camera. That literally is such an occupational hazard, but it’s true. I realized very early in shooting, it’s best not to tell her what I’m doing with the shot.”
Last Night, about a Manhattan couple who spend one night apart, provides an opportunity to talk dirty with Knightley: She and Sam Worthington play a husband and wife who are both tempted to cheat, she with an old flame (French actor Guillaume Canet) and he with a coworker (Eva Mendes). It’s a provocative film (Tadjedin and the Miramax marketing team came up with the joke tagline “Will your relationship survive this movie?”), worth seeing for Knightley’s nuanced performance. The movie introduces two distinct definitions of “affair”—extramarital sex without love and extramarital love without sex—and which is less forgivable became lively fodder for debate among cast and crew.
“When we were making it,” Knightley says, “the arguments on set were just amazing about whether mental infidelity is better or worse than physical infidelity. There was a huge gender divide on the question. Every single woman said that mental infidelity is 10 times worse than [an emotionless assignation]. And most men I spoke with said that it’s the physical act that would be the ultimate betrayal.”
“The film raises the question of whether having sex twice in one night during an extramarital dalliance is more of a betrayal than just once,” I say. “One would imagine a person might be overcome with regret after the pleasure of the first time subsides.”
“Right, that you’d have had your, ah, fill. Or whatever. And you’d say, ‘Oh, what the fuck have I done?’ There’s something to that. Once is one thing, but twice is rather a lot worse.”
“I imagine women will be appalled by Mendes’ character, who’s so willing to sink her claws into another woman’s man.”
“I haven’t ever been the other woman, but I felt sympathy for her in a funny way.”
“I’m shocked to hear you say that.”
“I think it’s quite a sexist view to say that because a guy all of a sudden cheats on a woman, it’s the other woman’s fault. It’s not the guy’s fault?”
“Of course, but don’t girls have to look out for one another? What about the sisterhood?”
“Oh, fuck off!” Knightley says. “C’mon. If you’re married, if you’re the guy, it’s your fucking responsibility. It’s your fault if you cheat on her. It’s not some other woman’s fault!”
Just then, Oscar the Grouch’s face bounces into view, attached to Grant, the Boot’s Australian barman, who’s come to refresh Knightley’s Perrier. All afternoon, he’s been raptly watching us from behind the bar, at one point chasing out the door a rabble of Italian-speaking lads who’d come to play pool. And soon, it’s Knightley who’s being escorted out by Marcus, who later pops me a sweet bon voyage e-mail. As soon as she’s gone, Grant hotfoots it over to my table.
“I heard one thing she said about herself which I thought was horrible,” he says. “That her talent has never matched her fame. I disagree with that fully. I wanted to say, What the hell are you going on about? You’ve been Oscar nominated. You took a role in Pride & Prejudice, a part that’s been done by many great actresses over God knows how many years, and you turned it into your own. I mean, you’ve starred with possibly the biggest movie producer of all time, Jerry Bruckheimer, in one of the highest-grossing trilogies ever!” Grant goes on, providing a Wikipediaworthy listing of Knightley’s accomplishments— and managing to, among other things, remember the name of Bend It Like Beckham’s director (Gurinder Chadha) and the most recent job of Knightley’s costar in that film (“a relatively unknown actress, Parminder Nagra, who was on ER”). He also shares his theory about why BAFTA (the British Oscars) neglected to nominate Knightley for Pride & Prejudice (because the 1995 BBC miniseries was so beloved, the British will forever think actress Jennifer Ehle is Elizabeth Bennet). But this, he concludes, does not excuse the Brits for the way they’ve treated one of their own. “The English people and the press are quite stupid and fickle, in all honesty,” he says. “They embrace the wrong people—Big Brother houseguests who have outed themselves as racists—whereas people like Keira Knightley, an A-list actress in the best terms, is just looked upon for her fashion or for her look.” And then, before going over to help the table of businessmen who have impatiently waited for him to finish his redfaced tirade, he adds: “It just drives me nuts that she’s loved more as an actress in America than she is here.”
So, a modest proposal: Knightley told me she’d developed a love of New York while filming Last Night, that she still thinks about the bagels and lox she’d get at Russ and Daughters, the Lower East Side smoked fish emporium she deems “amazing.” So, Keira, consider this a formal invitation to move to New York, a town where Brits can easily locate home comforts such as Marmite, HP Sauce, and even warm beer. New Yorkers won’t accost you; they’ll pretend to not even know who you are. And, as a show of goodwill, England, we’ll even return Piers Morgan.
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