Keira Knightley Opens Up About 'Going Mad' At The Height Of 2000s Media Intrusion

Keira Knightley in Paris earlier this yearKeira Knightley is opening up about the media intrusion she faced as a young actor when she first rose to fame.The Oscar nominee began her career as a child actor, and had her profile blow up on both sides of the Atlantic thanks to her roles in Bend It Like Beckham, Love Actually and the Pirates Of The Caribbean movies.Speaking to The Times, Keira said that this was when her life began to change.“I remember waking up one day and there were ten men outside my front door — and they didn’t leave for about five years,” she recalled.Keira continued: “I did go mad. Believe me. I went mad. I just managed to hide it.”The Black Doves star went on to share that the paparazzi outside her house would often berate her with jibes of “whore” and “slut”, particularly when she was in male company (including her brother and father) in the hopes of getting a rise out of them.She claimed: “They were trying to get a reaction out of them – provoking people into punching them, so they could sue. And that was the time the crashes started happening – they were forcing people off the roads, then getting even bigger money for pictures of a crashed actress or whatever.“And then Britney [Spears] shaved her head so it was like, ‘Great – we can push them into doing something fucking crazy’.”Keira said that she eventually came up with a tactic she said was inspired by Gandhi’s ethos of “passive resistance” to try and discourage the paparazzi from pursuing her.This included “wearing the same clothes every day” and “if I was being followed, I stopped walking”.“I’d literally stand there. Stock still,” she said. “One day, I stood there for five hours. ‘If you’re still there, I’m not going. I’m not going to move’.“Because it wasn’t a valuable shot to them if it was always me in the same clothes, standing still.There’s only so many times you can write, ‘Ooh, she’s wearing the same clothes,’ with a photo of me standing still. It gets boring.”After that, Keira took a break from the spotlight to go interrailing around Europe, after which she changed her approach to her career, taking on “smaller” roles and doing theatre roles.In the last few years, the British star has had something of a resurgence thanks to her roles in Netflix’s Black Doves and The Woman In Cabin 10, her latest thriller.She recently accepted the role of Professor Umbridge in a new audiobook series based on the Harry Potter stories, for which she’s received backlash due to the ongoing controversy surrounding its creator JK Rowling.Read Keira Knightley’s full interview in The Times here.READ MORE:Keira Knightley Reacts To Backlash Over Her Role In New Harry Potter ProjectOrlando Bloom Responds To Keira Knightley's Pirates Of The Caribbean Comments11 Keira Knightley Roles You'd Probably Forgotten She Played Before Black Doves

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