Keira Knightley has revealed that she felt hopeless while working on the first Pirates of the Caribbean film due to her inability to protest the Iraq war in the UK.
The 2003 conflict is the subject of Official Secrets, the docudrama which Keira stars in alongside Matt Smith and Ralph Fiennes. The 34-year-old actress portrays Katharine Gun, the British translator and whistleblower who tried to stop the war by exposing illegal spying in the U.S.
While Keira was passionate about the cause at the time, her conflicting filming schedule meant she couldn’t join the one million others at the historic anti-war protest happening in London.
‘I wasn’t on the big march; I was on the one before that,’ she told The Observer. ‘When the big march happened, I was in America shooting Pirates of the Caribbean.’
Despite having landed a career-making role in a Disney blockbuster that would go on to become a five film franchise, Keira’s excitement to work alongside Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp was tinged with frustration at missing out on the London demonstrations.
‘[It felt] utterly stupid that I was in a pirate costume and all my mates were on an anti-war march,’ the actress, who recently welcomed her second child with husband James Righton, said.
‘I remember sitting in the makeup bus and there being a conversation along the lines of “We are going into Iraq to pay them back for 9/11” and thinking: “Hold on – I don’t think that was Iraq,”’ she said.
For the actress, who rose to fame in Bend It Like Beckham, the current political climate has seen Keira and her peers find interest in protest again.
‘People are politically re-engaged,’ she said. ‘Different times create different audiences. Now, at a time when nationalism is on the rise, it seems important to set these questions [of patriotism] out there.
‘Whether they get to the “right” audience or not is another question of course.’
Official Secrets is in UK cinemas from Friday 18 October.
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