NEW YORK TIMES: Keira Knightley spent years being watched. Now she’s turning that experience into drama

No one yelled at Keira Knightley as she left a rehearsal space in North London. No cameras clicked as she walked the few blocks to a neighbourhood pub, settled into a corner booth and slid off her sunglasses.

It wasn’t always this way.

Knightley, 41, was 16 when she shot her breakout film, Bend It Like Beckham, and just 17 when she was cast in the Pirates Of The Caribbean franchise and Love Actually. She spent her late teens and early 20s making high-profile films like King Arthur and Pride & Prejudice (which brought an Oscar nomination) while living under the merciless gaze of the paparazzi. Photographers, often a dozen or more, would camp outside her house and follow her around London, yelling “slut” and “whore” just to provoke her. Tabloids hacked her phone.

“It did feel like one day I was shot out of a rocket and the whole world went completely nuts,” she said on an afternoon in late September over a bottle of sparkling water. She recalled being chased to her therapist’s office and her therapist telling her that she was the only client whose paranoia was entirely real.

Knightley had strategies back then. She tried to ruin photos by wearing the same clothes for days or standing still on the street. She became increasingly introverted. At 22, she suffered what she has described as a mental breakdown, and she gave up acting for a year. When she returned, she made different choices.

“I took a very conscious step back,” she said, looking out the window and toying with a ring on her finger. “It definitely did dictate my career.”

That was nearly two decades ago. So it is a coincidence, though maybe not entirely a coincidence, that her two current projects — the Netflix series Black Doves and a West End theatrical adaptation of the Oscar-winning film The Lives Of Others — deal explicitly with surveillance. In Black Doves, she plays Helen, a spy-for-hire married to Britain’s prime minister. In The Lives of Others, she stars as Christa-Maria, an actor spied on by a Stasi agent.

“I have a lived memory of being followed; I have the lived memory of the phone hacking scandal,” she said. “So I connect to that in a personal way.” Then she demurred. “But these stories are more interesting than my personal connection.”

As the child of actors, Will Knightley and Sharman Macdonald (who is also a playwright), performing felt inevitable. “I’m from a family of actors and writers, so that’s just what I saw,” Knightley said.

Already famous as a teenager, she never went to drama school. But her parents, especially her father, taught her the basics — script analysis, emotional work. Even back then, she had a particular gift for playing repressed characters with great stores of feeling — desire, rage, rebellion — just beneath their cool facades.

The facade has always come easily to Knightley. She is naturally observant, naturally reserved. “In my day-to-day life, dealing with people, I am quite far back,” she said.

“Emotionally, if you put me in a situation of high stress, you’re not going to see very much of that written on me.” She enjoys that remove, those boundaries. “They’re quite fun to play with,” she said.

Gore Verbinski, the director of the first three Pirates Of The Caribbean movies, met Knightley when she was 17. She was already an actor of remarkable force. “Plutonium,” was how he put it, adding an expletive for emphasis.

As they discussed the character she would play, a corseted girl liberated by piracy, Verbinski could already see “the rebel festering inside,” he said.

I can’t say I saw that rebel during the hour or two we spent at the pub. What I saw was, given the disruptions of Knightley’s early adulthood, arguably better. I saw a normal woman, dryly funny, seemingly centered and deeply engaged in her home life with her husband, musician James Righton, and their two daughters. She had a tendency to avoid eye contact, looking out the window or around the pub. Given her early experiences with the press, this was understandable.

She admitted, in a friendly way, that she wouldn’t sit for an interview like this if she didn’t have to. “If I had a total choice about it, it would only be the characters that were public,” she said.

Even today, Knightley doesn’t entirely understand why she was such a tabloid target, even as she acknowledges that other women of the era — Sienna Miller, Amy Winehouse, Lily Allen — had it just as bad or worse.

“My life was so quiet,” she said. “That was a sort of saving grace of it, actually, in a funny way. You couldn’t blame yourself.”

Since her mid-20s, Knightley has gravitated towards smaller movies, and she had not had a significant role on a series since starring in a PBS adaptation of Doctor Zhivago in 2002. But a few years ago, she decided to look for a series that filmed in London. She and writer Joe Barton (Giri/Haji) share a manager. Barton wrote the pilot for Black Doves in a weeklong sprint just after Christmas in 2022, and he and Knightley met in a coffee shop two weeks later.

“She was instantly likable, very down to earth, with a very British sense of humour,” Barton recalled.

That likability was essential. Helen, who has married a member of Parliament on the orders of a shadowy spy syndicate, does some very bad things. Yet the audience needed to side with her.

“The trick of the show is making the audience root for people that are objectively pretty immoral,” Barton said. “We needed that movie-star charisma.” He also recognised in her what Verbinski had seen, an ability to play both repression and defiance.

“She’s really good at playing people who are trying to break out of the restrictions that they’re under,” Barton said. “She has a great way of being someone fighting against the preconceptions of herself.”

Having been the target of spying, it would make sense for Knightley to want to explore the opposite in her work. But that isn’t why she took on Black Doves, and her approach to the part isn’t directly personal.

“You want to create a being who behaves in strange ways in given circumstances,” she said.

Helen’s particular strangeness — her amorality — excited Knightley. And as a working mother she was interested in the character’s compartmentalising of work life and home life. That’s as personal as it gets.

“It’s taken to extremes, but the core of it is that we have multiple different faces for different people,” she said.

In Season 2, the extremes are even more violent. Helen’s husband (Andrew Buchan) has become prime minister. “She’s more visible, which means that the stakes are higher, which is exciting,” Knightley said. “That also means that she’s slightly more constrained in what she can do.”

The vulnerability of prominence is also a theme of The Lives Of Others, the story of a Stasi agent assigned to spy on a playwright and an actor. The play reunites Knightley with Robert Icke, an assistant director on her stage debut, 2009’s The Misanthrope.

“It was crazy pressure, because she’d never been onstage before,” Icke recalled. “I remember watching them having to drag a paparazzo out of the dress circle.”

He and Knightley have stayed in touch, and after he cracked the adaptation, he immediately thought of her.

“She’s not frightened of being unlikable, she’s not frightened of playing characters who get stuff wrong,” Icke said. “I just knew she would get where this woman is and why.”

Like Helen, Christa-Maria is morally pliant and has worked out how to succeed within a corrupt system. “I find the mentality of a survivor interesting, because quite often they’re not morally fixed,” Knightley said. “How do you survive in a system where the rules keep changing and the power structures keep changing? And can you be an authentic self, or do you have to be malleable?”

This was her first time back in the theatre since a grim adaptation of Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin that played Broadway in 2015. She has had to reorient herself to the rhythms of rehearsal, the risk of appearing in front of a live audience. She felt at peace with it, even the risk.

“I’ve now had enough experience to go, I really hope it works, but if it doesn’t, I will dust myself off,” Knightley said.

Icke had observed this, too. “The person in that role is significantly more relaxed, significantly more centred, inevitably, than the person who was 24 and at the centre of this big storm of media attention,” he said. Back then the outside world had been so noisy; there is less noise now.

Knightley likes that. She sometimes misses the drive and hunger she felt in her youth, but she is proud of the quieter career she has built, proud of her family, proud of herself. She would prefer not to have come of age in a maelstrom of public scrutiny, and she definitely could have done without the public shaming. But she doesn’t entirely regret the past. It made her, like the characters she is drawn to, a survivor.

“It was one hell of an experience,” she said. “But I did survive it, and I did come out the other side and I feel grateful.

“Because I wouldn’t take any of those films away,” she continued. “The big decisions that led to that level of exposure — I wouldn’t make them differently. I would do them again.”

Black Doves Season 2, Netflix from November 5