According to Keira Knightley, after the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise became a surprise hit, it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
Getting your big break as an actor can often be a gruelling and difficult process. For some, it comes in their later years and for others it doesn’t come at all.
Knightley has revealed that while she is incredibly grateful for the support she received for playing Elizabeth Swann in the Disney movies, at the time, the new-found fame proved to be ‘pretty horrific’ for her.
Keira Knightley has explained that the fame she had to deal with in her younger years was ‘horrific’. (Disney)
The actor was just 17 years old when she appeared in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie – The Curse of the Black Pearl – and became a global sensation. In the same year she also starred in smash hit Love Actually.
However, the star has since confessed that the whole experience was quite ‘traumatic’ for her.
Speaking about the level of fame she was dealing with as a teenager, Knightley told Variety in a 2016 interview: “I found it pretty horrific. I’m not an extrovert, so I found that level of scrutiny and that level of fame really hard.
“It was an age where you are becoming, you haven’t become, and you need to make mistakes. It’s a very precarious age, particularly for women.
“You’re in some ways still a child. It was traumatic, but it set up the rest of my career.”
The actor even revealed in 2008, when she was in her early 20s, she had to undergo hypnotherapy so she didn’t have a panic attack on the BAFTA red carpet, and was later diagnosed with PTSD.
She told the Hollywood Reporter in 2018: “I did have a mental breakdown at 22, so I did take a year off there and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of all of that stuff. I went deep into therapy and all of that.”
What didn’t help Knightley at the time was that she was ‘incredibly hard on herself’ in the early stages of her career.
Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar in 2023, she said: “I was never good enough. I was utterly single-minded. I was so ambitious. I was so driven.
The actor played Elizabeth Swann in the film franchise. (Disney)
“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.”
That being said, the Pirates of the Caribbean star wouldn’t take anything back.
“I’m unbelievably lucky now, and my career is in a place where I really enjoy it, and I have a level of fame that’s much less intense,” Knightley told Variety in 2018.
“I can deal with it now, and that’s great. But at the time, it was not so great, and took many years of therapy to figure it out.”