It cannot be easy to be a young woman in the spotlight — let alone a very famous young woman in one of the most popular movie franchises at a time when people weren’t exactly kind or quiet about it. Which is exactly what actress Keira Knightley endured when she starred in the Pirates of the Caribbean movies.
And in a new interview with The Los Angeles Times in support of her new series, Black Doves, Knightley is speaking out quite plainly about the torment she endured being as famous as she was at the time. Going into detail on how tough it was on her — mentally and emotionally — to have such unwanted, inappropriate comments and attention, largely from men, thrown her way at such an impressionable age, the actress is making an extremely necessary and valid point about how we talk about women in culture.
“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 point when you are still growing,” Knightley said about her time starring opposite Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp.
Public Discourse Around Womens’ Bodies Affects Women — Famous Or Not
At the time of the first film’s release in 2003, Knightley was only 18 years old — barely out of childhood. Being immediately thrust into that level of stratospheric fame comes with a lot of good and a lot of bad, particularly for women whom men find sexually desirable. Heck, it’s not even that great for women that men do not want to objectify sexually, to be honest: because then you’re constantly criticized for not being that, too. It’s a toxic, no-win situation that is entirely inappropriate, given that it is not any woman’s job to be sexually desirable to men. It strips them of their personhood, and makes them feel like they are little more than body parts made for public consumption.
Knightley understands the cognitive dissonance that comes with that level of success at an early age and how, despite all that she endured, it still made the career and life she has now possible. “I wouldn’t have the financial stability or the career that I do now without that period,” she explained. “I had a five-year period between the age of 17 and 21-ish, and I’m never going to have that kind of success again. It totally set me up for life.”
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Starring Keira Knightley and Ben Whishaw, the spy thriller series has been met with rave reviews.
Still: “Did it come at a cost? Yes, it did. It came at a big cost.”
Discussing the sort of comments she suffered through, the thing that rattled her the most was how violent and blatantly misogynistic the surrounding discourse around her looks and body and own autonomy were. “There was an amount of gaslighting to be told by a load of men that ‘you wanted this,'” she explained. “It was rape speak. You know, ‘This is what you deserve.’ It was a very violent, misogynistic atmosphere.”
“They very specifically meant I wanted to be stalked by men,” she continued. “Whether that was stalking because somebody was mentally ill, or because people were earning money from it — it felt the same to me. It was a brutal time to be a young woman in the public eye.”
She added, plainly, that:
“I didn’t think it was OK at the time. I was very clear on it being absolutely shocking.”
This sort of thing is exactly why so many people out there today praise young women for speaking out against the sort of comments they are expected to just suffer through if they’re famous — like recent comments from musician Chappell Roan. The rise of social media has only added to the discourse in a toxic, more parasocial manner. Or, as Knightley put it, “social media has put that in a whole other context, when you look at the damage that’s been done to young women, to teenage girls. Ultimately, that’s what fame is — it’s being publicly shamed. A lot of teenage girls don’t survive that.”
Thankfully, the actress seems to have a good handle on it now, and we’re rooting for more and more people to speak out against the sort of hateful and/or harmful comments that so many people drop onto the internet without a worry or a care about how they might affect the person on the receiving end of them — no matter their level of fame.
You can next see Keira Knightley in
Black Doves
, which premieres on December 5 on Netflix.
You can view the original article HERE.
