Keira Knightley is looking back at her run-ins with paparazzi over the years and how she dealt with it.
The Woman in Cabin 10 star chatted with The Times recently and the conversation around paparazzi, particularly the way they acted in the early 2000s, came up.
Keep reading to find out more…
At the height of her fame, in the aftermath of films like Bend it Like Beckham, Pirates of The Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, and Love Actually being released, she says she remembers “waking up one day and there were ten men outside my front door.”
“They didn’t leave for about five years.”
Many female celebrities in the spotlight during that era were frequently targeted by paparazzi, especially stars like Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Amy Winehouse, and more.
The interviewer points out how many of them had a public breakdown at some point or other, but not Keira. According to her, that’s not the entire truth.
“Oh, I did go mad. Believe me. I went mad. I just managed to hide it,” she says.
As for the types of things that paparazzi would yell out to her, it varied.
“It was mostly ‘wh–e’. ‘S–t’ sometimes. Particularly if I was with someone — a boyfriend, my brother or my dad. They were trying to get a reaction out of them — provoking people into punching them, so they could sue,” the English actress reveals.
“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 shaved her head so it was like, ‘Great — we can push them into doing something f—ing lit.’ ”
Keira admits she eventually started trying to find ways to ensure the paparazzi wouldn’t bother her, like wearing the same clothes every day or standing in the same place for hours at a time.
“It wasn’t a valuable shot to them if it was always me in the same clothes, standing still,” she explains, “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.”
Her up-to-date movie The Woman in Cabin 10 is immediately streaming on Netflix.
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