Keira Knightley says she was ‘pursued by men’ after Pirates of the Caribbean and told ‘you wanted this’ | Keira Knightley

Keira Knightley has spoken out about the intimidation and intrusion she experienced at the start of her career when she was “pursued by men” who blamed her for their aggressive interest.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Knightley said that even as a young woman, I was very aware that it was absolutely shocking. There was a lot of gaslighting that had to be told by a lot of men that “you wanted this.” It was rape. You know, ‘this is what you deserve’. It was a very violent, misogynistic atmosphere.”

Knightley came to prominence at the age of 17 with her role in Bend It Like Beckham, before finding international fame with the Pirates of the Caribbean series and Love Actually.

“It’s very brutal to have your privacy taken away in your teenage years, early 20s, and to be put under that scrutiny at a time when you’re still growing,” Knightley said.

“Having said that, I would not have the financial stability or the career that I do now without that period. I had a five-year period between the ages of 17 and 21, and I’m never going to have that kind of success again. It completely prepared me for life. Has it cost? Yes, it did. It came at great cost.”

The actress said her “jaw dropped at the time” at how she was treated in public spaces, with the clear implication that “they very specifically believed that I wanted to be pursued by men. Whether it was stalking because someone was mentally ill or because people were making money off of it – it felt the same way to me. It was a brutal time to be a young woman in the public eye.”

Knightley, who has two daughters, said she believes the internet has exacerbated the problem. “Social media has put it in a whole different context when you look at the harm that has been done to young women, to teenage girls,” she said. “At the end of the day, that’s what fame is – it’s being publicly shamed. A lot of teenage girls don’t survive that.”

In an interview with the Times of London last month, Knightley said the popularity of the Pirates films put her in a difficult position: financially stable but emotionally beleaguered.

“It’s a funny thing when you have something that made and broke you at the same time,” Knightley said. “I was looked at as crap because of them, and yet because they did so well, I got the opportunity to make the movies that I ended up getting Oscar nominations for.

“They were the most successful films I’ll ever be a part of and they were the reason I was taken down publicly. So they’re in a very messed up place in my head.”

Six years ago, Knightley told The Hollywood Reporter that such exposure led to her having a breakdown at the age of 22. She didn’t leave the house for three months and needed hypnotherapy to feel able to walk on Bafta’s red carpet for reconciliation in 2008.

In 2018, Knightley wrote an essay, The Weaker Sex, which was about how explicit and internalized misogyny silences women. It ended with a broadside against male colleagues:

“Tell me what it is to be a woman. Be nice, be supportive, be beautiful but not too beautiful, be thin but not too thin, be sexy but not too sexy, be successful but not too successful… But i don’t wanna flirt and mom them, flirt and mom, flirt and mom I don’t wanna flirt with you because I don’t want to fuck you and I don’t want to mom you because I’m not your mom… I just want to work , mate. Is that okay? Speak and be heard, be spoken to and listen. Don’t get in the way.”

Speaking to The Guardian in 2018, Knightley said she wrote the play to try to “seize this moment in time and use our voices to keep the conversation going” and hoped the female experience would be more explored – and therefore more understood – in the future.

“Before motherhood,” she said, “you’re sexy, but if we’re talking about the whole vagina thing, it’s scary; there’s no sex there, so what we do is go into the virgin-mom retrofit, it’s nice and safe. The problem with those two images is that I think very few women actually identify with them. Women are supposed to play the flirt or the mother to make their voices heard. I can’t. It makes me feel sick.”