The next party I saw her at was an Oscars bash in Hollywood, in the temporary Los Angeles outpost of Soho House. She chose to play pool rather than network with all the industry bigwigs. She must be the only headlining new star not to have an American publicist. “I’ve never seen the point of one,” she tells me later. “I’m not sure what it is they do, and I think you have to pay them a lot of money. Paying a lot of money for something when you’re not quite sure what they do doesn’t seem to make any sense at all.”
For a girl of 20, let alone a girl who has been catapulted into the stratosphere of fame, Knightley is extremely grounded. When we meet at the Dorchester,she is marvellously self-deprecating and polite, with a self-assurance that is somehow beyond her years. “My mother says I was born 45,” she says. “I think it’s because I was a precocious little brat who wanted to be an actress and thought she was much older than she was.” She has often said that she demanded an agent at three and got one at six. “My mother also said that when I’m 22, I’ll meet myself, but I sort of worry what I’ll be like at 45. Hopefully not in a nappy.”
Knightley offers me tea. Her eyes are made up in vampish grey, like a 1920s heroine, her hair cut into a geometric boy’s crop with blonde streaks. She’s wearing a pair of black jeans that show off her bottom. It’s a perfect bottom —very high, very pert. It makes you wonder why she used a bottom double when she played a lap dancer in the movie Domino (coming out this summer). “I’d just finished Pride and Prejudice, and I hadn’t had a chance to train,” she says. “And I couldn’t actually lap-dance very well. I did the top half, but a girl called Tarin did the bottom. Another girl appeared in the paper saying it was her, but I’d never seen her in my life. I’m sure she’s got a great arse — but not in my film.” She chortles at the idea of being so famous that she even has someone pretending to be her stunt bottom.
Think Keira Knightley and you think plucky English girl, cut- glass voice, bluestocking. She has only ever done feelgood films — the sort where she triumphs over not much tragedy — but Domino and her next release, The Jacket, could change that. In the latter, she plays Jackie, a trampy, dysfunctional, self-destructive girl with a slow, cigarette-soaked American accent. It’s an odd movie, co-starring Adrien Brody as a Gulf-war veteran who loses his memory and gets put in a mental institution, is strapped into a straitjacket and locked in a mortuary drawer. It is darker than anything she has done before, and she is the best thing in it. Is this her trying to prove she can do damaged? Is she more in touch with her Jackie side than people think? “All the girls I’ve done have been quite nice girls,” she says, “but nobody’s just a nice girl, nobody’s just a horrible girl.”
So her life isn’t so perfect, then? She isn’t just a grounded type who never rebels, and who lived with her parents until very recently, and for whom everything was boho and lovely? She takes a little breath. “Actually, John Maybury (the director) didn’t want me for the part. He thought I was completely wrong. I begged him, ‘Please let me read, because I’m going to be stuck in corsets for the next 20 years’ — which was a bit melodramatic.” She casts her eyes downwards in shame for a nanosecond.
You sense that Knightley is quite hard on herself. Still, whether this is the direction she wants to go in or not, she will soon be back in corsets for Pirates of the Caribbean 2 and 3. She is filming them back to back till the beginning of next year. Does she mind being cut off from home, her family? “Obviously, I miss everyone like mad, and there might come a time when I want to be in one place, but at the moment it’s fine, and it’s cool to be travelling to Hawaii, LA, the Caribbean, wherever it is we’re going to film.”
She says she enjoys the physical roles. “I don’t mind chucking myself around a bit.” She became proficient at football for Bend It Like Beckham, skilled with a sword for Pirates, and learnt how to fire a gun for Domino. “Look,” she says. “I’ve got a scar. It would be boring if you did an action film and you didn’t do the action.”
I tell her I’m fascinated by the drastic change in her hair, from long and dark to short and blonde. Usually, it is a sign some huge emotional turmoil has gone on inside. She looks blank. It means that, either you are hugely confident about something new and afraid of nothing, or you have an insecurity and are trying to find out who you are from a look that fits. Which is it for you? “I’d love to say it was either, because they both sound fabulous, but actually it’s just work. The dark hair was extensions. I’m used to having it changed for films and I just walked past the hairdresser’s one day and went, ‘Oh, yes, I’m bored.’ So, no big thing.” I don’t quite believe that. I think there’s something more extreme going on. “Maybe,” she concedes, laughing. Certainly there must have been dark times in her life, like when her former boyfriend, Del Synnott, took an overdose — allegedly when he learnt that she had a new boyfriend (the Irish model Jamie Dornan).
I mention an interview in which Knightley said she was longing for a real macho man, instead of a pretty boy. “I never said that!” she cries. “Interviews about me? I don’t read any of them. It’s not a route to happiness, is it? I mean, sometimes they’re lovely, but if you believe the nice stuff, then you have to believe the nasty stuff, so it’s best not to believe. If it’s something where it’s taking the piss out of you, then that might be a better article. I love reading articles like that, but you can’t be entertained in the same way if you’re reading about yourself, can you?”
Considering all the girlie frivolousness you associate with her, there is a toughness about Knightley that is disconcerting. I know there is no way she wants to talk about Dornan. The night of the chicken dancing, she was glued to him nonstop; the next day, the tabloids, which she doesn’t read, carried pictures of them so obviously looking a couple. “I decided that I am completely happy talking about family, as in mum (scriptwriter), dad (actor), brother (teaches music to underprivileged children), but it would be foolish of me to start talking about relationships at this age, so until I have a husband and a couple of kids, I’m going to keep schtum.”
Very sensible. So, is there any chink in the armour? Any insecurity, anything she is afraid of? “I hated firing the machinegun in Domino. I burst into tears. I fell to the ground and couldn’t get up. I was terrified. Don’t know why. I know they say when you experience something like that, it’s like falling off a horse — you should get back on it. I have fallen off a horse and I didn’t get back on. I’m scared of horses — I thought, that thing didn’t want me on its back. I get that. I just don’t need to get back on.”
The definition of madness is to keep doing the same thing, failing at it and trying again. It takes most people decades to learn that if you keep making the same mistakes, you won’t get a different answer. Not Knightley. “Absolutely. F**k it. It’s all to do with that horse. You should just think, ‘No, that horse is mad. I’m not getting back on.’” I wonder what she will be like when she’s 45.
The Jacket is released on Friday
