Keira Knightley recently told The Times of London that “I went mad” during the height of “Pirates of the Caribbean” fame as the paparazzi descended onto her life and stalked her every move.
“It was mostly ‘whore’ [they’d shout],” the actor said. “‘Slut’ 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. And 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. And then Britney shaved her head so it was like, ‘Great — we can push them into doing something fucking crazy.’”
Knightley said she went into survival mode and “started wearing the same clothes every day” in order to make herself not appealing to tabloid magazines. Her clothes included “three pairs of the same jeans, stripy T-shirt, boots. I gave all my other clothes away.”
“And then, if I was being followed, I stopped walking,” Knightley added. “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’… [and then] it wasn’t a valuable shot to them if it was always me in the same clothes, standing still. 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 unwanted attention got so extreme that Knightley made the decision to quit acting and “my family backed me. They said, ‘Just fucking walk.’” She first went to London and then started taking various trains all over Europe. Knightley was never noticed.
“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 18 years old when Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean” franchise launched and turned her into an international star. She told The Times last year that fame came at a “big price” and she found herself “stalked by men.” To make matters worse, she was told she deserved such behavior since she was a famous actor. She added at the time: “It was a brutal time to be a young woman in the public eye.”
Knightley can currently be seen in the Netflix original movie “The Woman in Cabin 10,” now streaming.
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