Keira Knightley delivers a surprise before she even opens her mouth. She looks so model-slim in photographs, veering dangerously towards Hollywood thin. Yet in real life she is a glowing, healthy girl, with rich dark-brown hair and shape and vigour. She then tells me she prefers a pint of beer to a champagne cocktail at “places like Chinawhite”. She has a simple formula for enjoying herself: “Go with genuine friends, preferably to a quiet pub, rather than to parties where you are on parade and have to talk to famous people.”
Knightley is pretty famous herself, of course. At just 20, when most would-be actresses are struggling through drama school, she’s a fully fledged star. She’s clocked up Hollywood films, been paid a small fortune and lives in a swanky flat in west London. But she doesn’t talk like a winner. She’s been mauled by the critics and had her private life examined when she’s hardly had a chance to establish one. “Expectations,” she says, “have been far too high, and I always doubt I can live up to them.” To be honest, she hasn’t always lived up to them. She was outacted by Parminder Nagra in her 2002 breakthrough film, Bend It Like Beckham. Her Lara in the television miniseries Dr Zhivago, in the same year, could never match the memories of Julie Christie in the 1965 film. She giggled unconvincingly through the ludicrous Love Actually (2003), did not create waves in Pirates of the Caribbean and was a disappointing Guinevere in last year’s King Arthur. And her co-starring role with Adrien Brody in The Jacket, earlier this year, was virtually ignored.
Now, though, there’s been a sudden eating of words and swallowing of judgments. Her Elizabeth Bennet, in the new Pride & Prejudice, is terrific. She cannot even look out of her front window without seeing her face plastered on posters alongside glowing five-star reviews. The girl can act, after all. But there’s not even a hint of told-you-so satisfaction when we meet. She’s more concerned about the next hurdle than her giant leap over the last one. “It’s been a strange few years,” she observes. “I just like taking risks.”
There are plenty of those in her new film, Domino. It is directed by Tony Scott, a Brit known for snazzy action movies such as Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Days of Thunder (1990) and The Last Boy Scout (1991), and is loosely based on the life of the bounty-hunter Domino Harvey, daughter of the late English-based actor Laurence Harvey. The real Domino, an adviser on the film, was found dead in her bath at her Los Angeles home in June, aged 35, in mysterious circumstances. An investigation is still in progress: was it a drowning involving drugs, or a drowning by force? The film’s subject matter also simmers dangerously.
Scott, now 61, had known Domino since she was 20, and he has fudged dates in the story so he could hire an actress of the same age. He has wanted to put her life story on screen for the past 10 years. Yet he has avoided telling it exactly as it was, changing names along the way. And when Scott speaks about her, it’s with the hyperbole usually reserved for those dreadful portentous trailers. “She had two distinct sides — an adrenaline junkie and a wounded bird, ” he declares. “But she always lived life with the throttle wide open. I warned her, ‘You are going to kick down one too many doors.’”
Knightley was plunged into locations in LA and Las Vegas to play this odd character in an even odder story, with Domino herself watching some of the performance from the sidelines. It was just four days after completing Pride & Prejudice in the English countryside. For company, she had Mickey Rourke, still making a comeback from self- destruction, as the boss of her team of bounty-hunters; the former sex kitten Jacqueline Bisset playing her mother; the eccentric Christopher Walken as a seedy TV producer, assisted by the quirky Hollywood actress Mena Suvari (American Beauty); and Lucy Liu (Ally McBeal, Charlie’s Angels) as an FBI investigator. The high-maintenance cast alone was enough to melt away memories of Lizzie Bennet.
“In my four days off between films, I spent one day getting a visa to work in America and three days learning how to be a bounty-hunter,” says Knightley. “I was doing martial-arts lessons while making Pride & Prejudice, working with a trainer during every spare hour. By the time filming was over, I was wrecked. I could not get my head into Domino at all. I had phone calls from Tony Scott to talk about the character, but I was so into Lizzie Bennet and Jane Austen, I could not even try to discuss it. A four-day break is not enough — and I have learnt a lesson.”
Her preparation included getting a fairly dramatic haircut. “I was walking past a hairdresser near home and thought, it’s time for a change,” she says. “So I decided to have my hair chopped off to short and punky, which you see in the film. I had longer hair and a wig for Lizzie. I needed to look in the mirror and not see that character any more. I had to cut her out of my life.”
This talk of hairdressers establishes the fact that Knightley has nobody special in charge of her coiffure, which is unusual in itself for somebody with her profile and income. She apparently has no time for the “entourage” — business manager, lawyer, publicist, hair and make-up team — hired by virtually every actress who has had a couple of hits.
So, she doesn’t deliver the usual drivel about the director and cast being wonderful, and the crew being the best she’s ever worked with. This is mightily refreshing. She wears an expensive-looking sleeveless black dress (“from Topshop”) with a solid-gold necklace (“my grandmother’s”), and speaks like a woman in a pretty girl’s body.
“I was uncomfortable with guns,” she admits. “I thought I liked them, because I enjoyed doing things with swords and knives on Arthur and Pirates. I enjoyed boxing, too, and any training, like the football for Beckham. But this? Definitely not. The reality of guns, and knowing how easy it was to pick one up and shoot somebody dead, really freaked me out. So there were problems.” There is one scene in which Domino has to fire two machineguns — twice the problem? “I burst into tears,” she says. “My knees locked and I was so frightened, I could not make myself stand up and fire those guns.”
Scott came to her rescue. He knew she was not the most obvious choice for the role. “Taking Keira on this journey was akin to how the real Domino felt when first being exposed to this dark world,” he insists. He told his star: “When we do the take, start screaming and I guarantee you will stand up and fire.” It worked. Knightley confirms: “I was screaming, the guns were pumping, and shells were jumping out, burning hot, and hitting me. One got stuck on my neck and I had a second-degree burn. After that, my costume had to cover up my burn dressing.”
There was another burning topic: Domino’s sexuality. There had been reports about her fury that the film covered up her preference for female lovers. Instead, Knightley delivers a full-on sex scene with the Venezuelan actor Edgar Ramirez, as a fellow bounty-hunter, Choco. “We do not deal with a girl trying to figure out her sexuality,” she says, firmly. “I also met Domino’s real boyfriend on set, so there was obviously an area of doubt.” But it may come as something of a shock, to an audience who saw Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet gazing innocently into the eyes of Matthew Macfadyen’s Mr Darcy, to witness her naked lust. “I did not have a problem with it, ” she says. “I take my clothes off for a part if it feels right and is done stylishly — no problem.”
The real Domino, she says, never made her lesbian past an issue when they spoke. “She interviewed me before I got the part,” she recalls. “She asked if I went to drama school, and the answer was no. And she asked a lot about my dad (the actor Will Knightley), because she was the daughter of an actor too.” There was no further similarity on that score.
Domino grew up in a wealthy household, but never really knew her father, who died, aged 45, of cancer in 1973. She moved to Beverly Hills as a teenager, where her mother, the model Paulene Stone, married a famous restaurant-owner, Peter Morton. Again, she lived amid wealth and privilege.
Knightley’s girl-next-door past and career, by comparison, have been featherbedded by security and support from her actor father, who has enjoyed only modest success, and her playwright mother, Sharman Macdonald. She lived in a three-bed terraced home in Teddington, Surrey, and went to a neighbourhood co-ed comprehensive. Acting, at first, was a hobby. “In my opinion, Domino was a lost soul,” she says. “So much in life is about luck and timing, and, with my parents, I was not in any doubt as to the true facts of acting life.” Those facts included the warning that insecurity was rife, and success fleeting.
Knightley obviously did not take it too much to heart. She was asking for an agent by the age of three (“I had heard my parents talking about theirs”) and was already planning, aged seven, to own her own flat. “I even had a jar with a lot of pennies saved up,” she says. She was also showing early signs of being an achiever, with childhood roles in television dramas such as A Village Affair (1994), Treasure Seekers (1996) and Coming Home (1998). She moved up a a few gears at 14 with Star Wars: Episode 1 — The Phantom Menace, in which she played Natalie Portman’s decoy. By the time she was in The Hole (2001), opposite the American Thora Birch, in the wake of her success with American Beauty, I was getting excited calls from its British director, Nick Hamm. “Thora is great — but Keira is the one to watch,” he forecast. “She’s going to be an enormous star.”
Knightley’s star turns have come so fast and furious that, until now, her acting abilities and life experiences have been playing catch-up. Domino is, after all, her 19th film role, and she’s already filming her 20th: the Pirates of the Caribbean sequel, Dead Man’s Chest. She is also gossip-column fodder, with an on-off-on boyfriend, the model Jamie Dornan, 22.
“That is one of the negatives about all this,” she says, sweeping her hand around a lavish London hotel suite. “My dad says, ‘I am really happy for your success — but part of me wishes you could enjoy being anonymous at 20.’ You can’t have it all, can you?”
Domino is released on October 14
