On her journey from rising star to leading lady, Keira Knightley has experienced the highs and lows of a life in the spotlight. As she returns to our screens to play another strong and self-determined character, she talks to Helena Lee about finding her voice, confronting her fears and achieving a new equilibrium.
The mist is lifting like a veil above the London skyline, the chill scarcely offset by the early-spring sun. Keira Knightley is standing on the rooftop balcony of the Elizabeth Taylor suite at the Dorchester, clothed in an updated version of Chanel’s little black jacket – she’s a close friend of the house – and smiling happily for Bazaar’s photographer with the panoramic vista of Hyde Park behind her.
"It was very cold!" she admits, when we meet two days later for lunch near her home in north London, where she lives with her musician husband James Righton and their two children. We’re at a local Italian restaurant, a place she used to take her daughters when they were babies who would spread pasta and sauce all over the table. She is casually chic, and more wrapped up this time – layering a chunky-knit burgundy tank top over a black poloneck, and clad in boyfriend jeans and Doc Martens.
It transpires that the photo shoot almost ended in disaster, when Knightley realised that she’d lost her engagement ring. "I didn’t say anything to my husband when I got home," she says, grimacing. "I’d already been onto the insurance, looked up cheap alternatives online. We were watching TV and I was desperately texting the team to see whether it had been found, and James was like, 'Who are you texting?!' I’d make a great spy." Fortunately, it was found on the balcony and returned to her the next day. "I experienced loss, I came to terms with it, the ring came back. I am whole again," she deadpans, before breaking into peals of laughter.
This incident seems to sum up the slight disarray in her life right now. She’s out of the "baby bit" but is still weathering "extreme tiredness" and the unpredictable mayhem that comes with having a young family (her eldest, Edie, is seven, and Delilah is four). She hasn’t taken part in an interview or a shoot for a long time and has, she says, "forgotten how to do it", hence putting her ring in her pocket rather than leaving it safely at home. "It’s all active chaos, isn’t it? You just have to embrace the chaos."
In the past, Knightley has been open about the unfair demands of motherhood, railing against the gender scripts that are written into society. In 2018, she contributed an essay to Scarlett Curtis’ collection Feminists Don’t Wear Pink, detailing the effects of having a child on her body. On accepting her trophy at Bazaar’s Women of the Year Awards five years ago, for her performance as the French writer Colette, she echoed this sentiment by declaring that she had been "leaking milk" even as she played these convention-breaking roles. But today, she seems more sanguine. In her group of friends, the men are heavily involved in the rigours of family life.
"The guys are super-active. Maybe that’s not normal. But [in my situation], it has to be a partnership. The heavy lifting of childcare has to be acknowledged. It’s hard work, it’s vital, it’s undervalued. And it’s so exhausting." Knightley and Righton don’t currently have a nanny, but when the children were much younger and the couple deep in their own respective projects – she as an actress on stage and screen, he producing albums and on tour – they required lots of hired help.
"During filming, the hours are unpredictable and extreme. I worked out I needed three people to do what one full-time parent did. When you hear somebody say, 'I’m just staying home with the kids', that’s not a 'just'. That’s a huge thing." Like many women, Knightley dislikes being asked about the perennial struggle between family and professional responsibilities; after all, men are never asked the same question. But she remains curious about it herself. "We’re constantly asking it," she says philosophically, "because what we actually want to know is, how are you doing it? Because I don’t feel like I’m doing it."
For her latest film, a 1960s thriller based on the notorious case of the Boston Strangler, the whole family relocated to the east-coast city in November 2021, in what they hoped would be an adventure. Together with Righton, she had planned the two-month trip, putting Edie into school and organising playgroups for Delilah, who was then two. "James is a really good traveller – that takes a lot of stress off the logistics," she says. "He’s fearless about exploring and doing all the research." However, they were plunged back into the pandemic as the move coincided with a tidal wave of the Omicron variant. Filming was delayed by 10 days because the whole family caught Covid, and Righton ended up caring for Delilah throughout the production period (which doubled to four months), as group activities were cancelled. "My husband became a full-time dad," she remembers with a smile. "I felt a lot of guilt because I had suddenly put my very sociable two-year-old into a situation where she was basically in lockdown the entire time. It was amazingly bad timing. We were foiled by the plague."
The constraints of family life seeped into the film, literally and thematically. Knightley plays the real-life investigative reporter Loretta McLaughlin, who worked for the Record American newspaper in Boston. McLaughlin had written a four-part story with a colleague, Jean Cole, about a case in which 13 women were gruesomely murdered, and was the first person to dub the killer ‘the Boston Strangler’. It’s a pacy thriller that overtly explores the systemic sexism manifested both in the newsroom and in attitude towards the middle-aged women who were murdered. What mainly attracted Knightley to the script were the family dynamics that drove the film – that juggle between McLaughlin’s private life as a married mother-of-three and professional life as a full-time working woman. "I was struck by the pressure and the individual struggles of both Loretta and her husband for their own autonomy," she says, picking out a shard of crispy pig’s ear from a starter we’re sharing. "One minute you’re a team, then the next you’re against each other."
In 2012, it was reported that the actor Casey Affleck would produce a movie about the Boston Strangler, and that he would play the detective in charge of the investigation. There have been no updates on the project since 2014, which suggests it has been abandoned, but had it gone ahead, the infamous case would have had the classic treatment of a male-led narrative. When I mention this to Knightley, she is unaware of this fact, but not surprised. "Look at that genre," she says. "Women will be the victims. There will be a good male and a bad male. The man will get the bad guy and save the day. Here, we’re seeing the impact of the case through a woman’s eyes. Although you’re still not viewing the victims as full people, we’re at least following the story through the female gaze."
Her portrayal of a hard-boiled reporter exposes the structural difficulties that women face in trying to do the same work as men. In one disturbing episode, the fact that McLaughlin and Coleare young female journalists investigating these grisly murders becomes the subject of a media frenzy that inhibits their ability to do their jobs and ultimately puts their lives in danger. "Women in public spaces – it’s a constant problem," Knightley says. "From the everyday office situation, where your voice isn’t being heard, to the most extreme aspect, femicide. The film told an interesting story that covered the whole spectrum."
Knightley has never felt entirely at ease with being in the spotlight, but she uses her platform to champion the causes she cares about. Through her recent roles – think of the activist Sally Alexander in Misbehaviour or the whistleblower Katharine Gun in Official Secrets – she channels a spirit of rebellion and seeks to shatter the confines society puts on women. She credits her parents (Sharman MacDonald, a writer, and Will Knightley, an actor) with instilling a strong sense of equality in her and subverting the idea of gender roles. "It was never an issue that my mother earned more than my dad," she says, tucking into her main course of brill with lentils and mussels. It was only once she became famous aged 17 that she became aware of the expectations put upon her. "I had quite an entrance into adult life, an extreme landing because of the experience of fame at a very early age," says Knightley. "There’s a funny place where women are meant to sit, publicly, and I never felt comfortable with that. It was a big jolt." The parts she was playing presented a particular form of femininity that was not, she says, her "lived experience". "I was being judged on what I was projecting."
She is referring to her breakout turn 20 years ago as Elizabeth Swann in Pirates of the Caribbean. "She was the object of everybody’s lust," Knightley concedes. "Not that she doesn’t have a lot of fight in her. But it was interesting coming from being really tomboyish to getting projected as quite the opposite. I felt very constrained. I felt very stuck. So the roles afterwards were about trying to break out of that." She considers the period between 2003 and 2008 "a very tricky five-year window". Though she appeared in high-profile films such as Love Actually, Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, her experience of feeling trapped impeded her, and she felt "quite powerless". "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."
"I was incredibly hard on myself. I was never good enough. I was utterly single-minded. I was so ambitious. I was so driven. I was always trying to get better and better and improve, which is an exhausting way to live your life. Exhausting. I am in awe of my 22-year-old self, because I’d like a bit more of her back. And it’s only by not being like that any longer that I realise how extraordinary it was. But it does have a cost." What is that cost? "Burnout." Knightley took two years out from working after being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. She came back to professional life, and took on more indie films, along with more nuanced roles in projects such as The Imitation Game, for which she received an Oscar nomination. "There was never an ounce of me that wasn’t going to find a way through," she says.
Now that Knightley is almost 38, she is particularly interested in the way women are perceived as they grow older. In The Boston Strangler, many victims were in their fifties, and so were ignored by the media. I remind her of McLaughlin’s quip: "How many women have to be killed before it’s a story?" "They were referred to as elderly!" Knightley exclaims. "They were victims of these horrific crimes, yet they weren’t looked at. They were invisible to the public." I ask her if she worries about ageism. "A lot of the conversations I’ll have with my girlfriends are, 'Oh my God, I’ve got a line [wrinkle]. Oh God!'" she raises her eyebrows in mock horror.
"Change is always tricky. We’re taught that it’s bad. We’re taught that we don’t want grey hair. I love that you’ve got grey hair," she says, gesticulating towards my smattering of silver strands. "You’ve got Madonna on the one hand – and we’re told that’s not the right thing. Then you have someone else, where we’re told, 'They looked better 20 years ago'. How are we, culturally, meant to age?" Though this is clearly rhetorical, she goes on to cite Helen Mirren as a "terribly good" example. "She ages in the most sensational manner. She’s fabulous in every way. You look at her and think, 'God, you’re having so much fun. You’re enjoying life so much.'" She grins at the thought. If this is the philosophy that Knightley is living by, she has a lot to look forward to – and certainly plenty of time for fun.
‘The Boston Strangler’ is released on Disney + on 17 March
The April issue of Bazaar UK is on newsstands nationwide 9 March
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