Keira Knightley portrayed Elizabeth Swann in four of the franchise’s films
Keira Knightley claimed that starring in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise helped ‘set up the rest of [her] career’ but revealed the experience was ‘traumatic’.
25 years ago, two-time Academy Award nominee Knightly, 39, made her Hollywood breakthrough starring as Sabé in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.
Since then, she’s appeared in everything from Bend It Like Beckham, the 2005 film adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride & Prejudice and more recently, the apocalyptic black comedy Silent Night.
Another of Knightley’s roles that propelled her to global stardom was the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, The Curse of the Black Pearl.
The flick saw the star – who was just 17 at the time – portraying Elizabeth Swann, the daughter of Governor Weatherby Swann (played by Jonathan Pryce) and love interest to protagonist Will Turner (Orlando Bloom).
Following the success of The Curse of the Black Pearl, the star then appeared in its sequels Dead Man’s Chest, At World’s End and Dead Men Tell No Tales.
In 2016, the mother-of-two opened up about her time on the set of Curse of the Black Pearl – going as far as to call it ‘traumatic’.
“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 Variety 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.”
The actor even revealed in 2008, when she was in her early 20s, she had to undergo hypnotherapy so she didn’t have a panic attack on the BAFTA red carpet and was later diagnosed with PTSD.
She told the Hollywood Reporter in 2018: “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.”
What didn’t help Knightley at the time was that she was ‘incredibly hard on herself’ in the early stages of her career.
Speaking to Harper’s Bazaar in 2023, she said: “I was never good enough. I was utterly single-minded. I was so ambitious. I was so driven.
“I was always trying to get better and better and improve, which is an exhausting way to live your life. Exhausting.
“I am in awe of my 22-year-old self, because I’d like a bit more of her back. And it’s only by not being like that any longer that I realise how extraordinary it was. But it does have a cost.”
That being said, the Disney star apparently wouldn’t take anything back.
“I’m unbelievably lucky now, and my career is in a place where I really enjoy it, and I have a level of fame that’s much less intense,” Knightley told Variety in 2018.
“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.”
