Keira Knightley says Pirates of the Caribbean made her feel 'caged'

Keira Knightley said she felt 'caged' after doing Pirates of the Caribbean and afterwards took roles to try and 'break out' of the image people were projecting onto her.

She was just 17 years old when she was cast in one of the main roles in some movie called Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. You might have heard of it.

While she'd already had parts in The Phantom Menace and Bend It Like Beckham, it was Pirates of the Caribbean that catapulted her to greater fame.

However, it's this fame and the role that really put her on Hollywood's map that she's spoken about as making her feel 'very constrained' as it gave her 'quite an entrance into adult life'.

Knightley said it was a jarring change going from 'being really tomboyish' in Bend It Like Beckham to 'getting projected as quite the opposite' in Pirates of the Caribbean.

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Speaking to Harper's Bazaar, she said her Pirates character Elizabeth Swann was 'the object of everybody's lust' in the movie and it kicked off 'a very tricky five-year window' in her life where she felt 'quite powerless'.

She said: "I didn’t have a sense of how to articulate it. It very much felt like I was caged in a thing I didn’t understand.

"I was incredibly hard on myself. I was never good enough. I was utterly single-minded. I was so ambitious. I was so driven.

"I was always trying to get better and better and improve, which is an exhausting way to live your life."

In this time between 2003 and 2008 Knightley starred in a range of movies including Love Actually, Pride & Prejudice, Atonement and two more Pirates flicks.

In the end, she decided to take a couple of years off after suffering from burnout and being diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, when she returned to acting she targeted more nuanced roles and indie films where the projects appealed to her.

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As for the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, it's been almost six years since the last movie and while there have been discussions over bringing it back there's been a lot of development hell surrounding the project.

There was meant to be a sixth movie with Margot Robbie in the lead role in development but the star said it was 'dead', though franchise producer Jerry Bruckheimer said it actually wasn't and maybe we'd see that script do something in the future.

He mentioned that another script penned by Ted Elliot (writer of the first four Pirates movies) and Craig Mazin, (creator of Chernobyl and co-creator of The Last of Us) was 'going forward first'.

Whether it actually gets made is anyone's guess.