Keira Knightley is opening up about the difficult years that came with sudden fame after Pirates of the Caribbean, saying the nonstop attention from paparazzi pushed her to the edge.
In a recent interview with The Times of London, the British star admitted, “I went mad,” as photographers began following her everywhere.
“It was mostly ‘wh–re’ [they’d shout],” she said.
“‘Sl–t’ sometimes. Particularly if I was with someone — a boyfriend, my brother or my dad. They were trying to get a reaction out of them — provoking people into punching them, so they could sue.”
Knightley recalled how the paparazzi culture became even more dangerous at the time.
“That was the time the crashes started happening — they were forcing people off the roads, then getting even bigger money for pictures of a crashed actress or whatever,” she said.
“And then Britney shaved her head so it was like, ‘Great — we can push them into doing something f–king crazy.’”
The pressure led Knightley to take drastic measures to protect herself. She said she went into survival mode and began wearing the same outfit every day to make herself less appealing to tabloids.
“Three pairs of the same jeans, stripy T-shirt, boots. I gave all my other clothes away,” she explained.
She also learned to stop giving photographers the reaction they wanted.
“And then, if I was being followed, I stopped walking,” she shared.
“I’d literally stand there. Stock still. One day, I stood there for five hours. ‘If you’re still there, I’m not going. I’m not going to move.’” Eventually, the paparazzi lost interest.
“It wasn’t a valuable shot to them if it was always me in the same clothes, standing still,” she added. “There’s only so many times you can write, ‘Ooh, she’s wearing the same clothes,’ with a photo of me standing still. It gets boring.”
The constant harassment eventually pushed her to step away from acting altogether. Knightley said her family supported her decision to walk away.
“My family backed me. They said, ‘Just f–king walk.’”
She moved to London for a while and then traveled through Europe by train, blending in with the crowd.
“I was very good,” she said. “Museums, trains… no one expects to see you there. I was very scruffy, which they also wouldn’t have expected. You just don’t make eye contact, go a bit hunched. I kind of slithered.”
Knightley was only 18 when Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean franchise made her a global star.
Looking back, she admitted that fame came at a heavy cost. She told The Times last year that she was “stalked by men” and was made to feel she “deserved it” because she was famous.
“It was a brutal time to be a young woman in the public eye,” she said.
Now, years later, Knightley continues to work on her own terms and can currently be seen in the Netflix original film The Woman in Cabin 10, which is now streaming.
