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Keira Knightley Interview
by Martyn Palmer
Keira Knightley revelled in the sheer physical challenge of it all. The horse riding, the stunt work, the weapons training, all of it essential to bringing her character, Guinevere, bursting to life in the epic story of King Arthur. “It was just great and quite honestly, I felt like one of the boys,” she says.
And the rest of the boys - Clive Owen, Ray Winstone, Ioan Gruffudd, director Antoine Fuqua and the rest - will tell you to a man that the beautiful Ms Knightley is a formidable force to be reckoned with when it comes to the rough and tumble of a big action adventure film set. She's one of the boys and then some.
“She is very, very special,” says her director. “And can you believe that when we were filming she was only 18? It's just incredible. She is a great actress and I've never seen anyone more focused. She was there every day, even on days when she wasn't supposed to be working she would be training - riding horses, shooting bows, fighting with knives and swords and she never complained once.”
Keira has enjoyed the kind of mind blowing, soaring career that most young actresses can only dream of. “I've been incredibly lucky,” she says.
In 2002, she appeared in her break out role as `Jules' Paxton, the soccer mad teen in the runaway success that was Bend It Like Beckham, and went on to star alongside Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom in the blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean, play a blushing bride in Richard Curtis's lavish British comedy, Love Actually, and in between find the time to play Lara in the acclaimed British television remake of Dr Zhivago.
“This has been a dream forever,” says Keira. “And now I'm getting an opportunity which very, very few people get and there's no way I'm not going to take it and see how far it will go.”
The daughter of actor Will Knightley and playwright Sharman Macdonald, Keira first acted as a nine year old in A Village Affair, a made for tv movie. Her next big break came when she was 14, playing Sabe in Stars Wars Episode 1 - The Phantom Menace.
“I was on Star Wars for about three weeks and it just gave me ever lasting kudos with my older brother - which is fine, and it's very nice on the CV,” she laughs.
Before Bend It Like Beckham sent her career into overdrive, Keira had planned on finishing her A level courses (English school examinations) and taking a brick laying course at a local college. Work - in the tantalising form of films like King Arthur - keeps getting in the way.
She auditioned several times for Antoine and at one point convinced herself that she had missed out on the role of Guinevere. Fortunately, she was wrong.
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Interviews
Keira Knightley Interview
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