Featured Image Credit: BBC 2
Topics: Celebrity, Film and TV, Mental Health, UK News
Liv Bridge
Keira Knightley has claimed she suffered trauma after starring in Pirates of the Caribbean.
The fantasy movie series boasted a star-studded cast, including Johnny Depp, Orlando Bloom and Knightley, to name just a few, and first graced our screens back in 2003.
Pirates of the Caribbean then went on to snowball into a multi-billion dollar franchise, with five movies firmly under its belt by the time the plot wrapped up in 2017.
However, while it propelled the British actress to international stardom as Elizabeth Swann, the daughter of Governor Weatherby Swann (played by Jonathan Pryce) and love interest to Will Turner (Bloom), Knightley has revealed she struggled in the aftermath with all the limelight.
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Aged just 17 in the first movie, she grew up in front of the camera, from The Curse of the Black Pearl to starring in three of its sequels, Dead Man’s Chest, At World’s End, and Dead Men Tell No Tales.
Opening up to Variety, the mom-of-two said it was a 'traumatic' ordeal.
"I found it pretty horrific. I’m not an extrovert, so I found that level of scrutiny and that level of fame really hard," she told the outlet in 2016. "It was an age where you are becoming, you haven’t become, and you need to make mistakes. It’s a very precarious age, particularly for women.
"You’re in some ways still a child. It was traumatic, but it set up the rest of my career."
It was apparently so difficult that Knightley said she had to seek professional help through hypnotherapy as a young woman in her early twenties.
Reflecting that she felt 'exhausted' by her own ambition, the Bend It Like Beckham star said she feared she would have a panic attack on the BAFTA red carpet after being diagnosed with PTSD.
"I did have a mental breakdown at 22, so I did take a year off there and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder because of all of that stuff. I went deep into therapy and all of that," she added to Hollywood Reporter in 2018.
Fortunately, the Love Actually star eventually found her feet, telling Variety that same year that she feels 'lucky' to be in a place where she enjoys her career and a 'level of fame that's much less intense'.
"I can deal with it now, and that’s great. But at the time, it was not so great, and took many years of therapy to figure it out."
Still, the 40-year-old recently confessed on BBC Radio 2's The Scott Mills Breakfast Show on Monday (November 2) that she's only watched a handful of movies she's starred in, and one Pirates of the Caribbean film in particular didn't make the cut.
"It's funny because my relationship with a piece of work is obviously different from people viewing it,” Knightley said. “What’s wonderful about those films is they have become people's favorites and they watch them again and again and again and again."
Despite others enjoying her work, the legendary actress says she has only watched some of the films 'once', including Love Actually at the premiere - more than 20 years ago.
When asked if she watched Pirates of the Caribbean, Knightley confessed she never tuned in to the third film.
“I just feel there’s too much face. There's just such a lot of face," she joked in her reasoning. "Really close up, large face.
“It's just, nobody needs to see that.”