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 Keira Knightley Talks King Arthur 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.
In this version of the enduring Arthurian myth, we are in the Dark Ages - as opposed to Medieval times where we usually find Arthur and his knights - and writers David Franzoni and John Lee Hancock have fashioned a fascinating, gripping story.
The writers have used recent archeological clues and evidence that suggest that Arthur, if he existed, could have been a Roman general called Artorious, who commanded a band of Sarmation warriors - or Knights of the Round Table.
The heavily outnumbered Sarmations had fought a noble battle when the Romans invaded their homeland in the Ukraine and in exchange for their lives, the fighters were incorporated into the Roman military for generations to come - each young man pressed into serving Rome for 15 years in a far flung, hostile outpost called Britain.
King Arthur starts at a pivotal moment in history - as the crumbling Roman Empire begins to pull out of Britain But Arthur (Clive Owen) and his band of Sarmation knights - Lancelot, Galahad, Bors, Tristran and Gawain - are given one last “mission from hell”, to rescue a Roman nobleman and his family who are stranded behind enemy lines.
And as Rome prepares to leave, the brutal Saxons, sensing a power vacuum, invade the island from the north, determined to enslave the Brits themselves. Guinevere (Knightley) is Queen of the Wodes - the band of Picts and Celts, the British natives - who will have to fight the Saxons for their very survival.
And she knows, that if she can persuade Arthur - himself half Roman, half Brit - and his knights to stay and fight with her, she has a chance of saving her people. Arthur, in turn, may well realise his own destiny.
Keira, now 19, lives in London. This interview was conducted on set for King Arthur in Ireland. Keira spots long black tresses almost down to her waist.
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