Keira Knightley is currently promoting Boston Strangler, a film where she plays the real-life Record American reporter Loretta McLaughlin who first referred to the serial killer as “the Boston Strangler” in the 1960s. Keira in a historical drama/thriller? Yes, give it to me. Keira covers Harper’s Bazaar UK to promote the film and she acknowledges that it’s been a while since she’s been on a promotional tour or given an interview to a magazine. She has two daughters, an 8-year-old and a 4-year-old, and she’s still married to James Righton. A big chunk of this interview is Keira talking about how great James is and how he’s a hands-on father who relocates with Keira when she’s filming on location. Some highlights:
She lost her engagement ring on his Bazaar shoot. “I didn’t say anything to my husband when I got home. 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.”
The husbands in her friend group are hands-on fathers: “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…. 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.”
She dislikes being asked about balance: “We’re constantly asking it, because what we actually want to know is, how are you doing it? Because I don’t feel like I’m doing it.”
Location shoot for ‘Boston Strangler’: “James is a really good traveller – that takes a lot of stress off the logistics. 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. 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.”
Playing a female journalist: “Women in public spaces – it’s a constant problem. 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.”
Playing Elizabeth Swann in Pirates of the Caribbean. “She was the object of everybody’s lust. 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… 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.”
Burnout in her 20s: “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. “There was never an ounce of me that wasn’t going to find a way through.”
I remember reading her interviews from her dogsh-t 20s and realizing how overwhelmed and miserable she was during that time. It was like a weight was lifted from her shoulders when she turned 30 and became a mother – it was almost like she was thinking “oh, I don’t have to be the It Girl/ingenue anymore, YAY!” Her husband sounds like a real one, super-supportive of her career and like a really good father. I love that she expected that from him.
Cover & IG courtesy of Harper’s Bazaar UK.
