Keira Knightley is no longer interested in acting in nude scenes or sex scenes helmed by male directors. In a recent interview, the Oscar-nominated actor talked about the no-nudity clause in her contracts, saying it essentially came down to her discomfort with the male gaze.
“I don’t have an absolute ban [on nude scenes]—but I kind of do with men,” Knightley said in a conversation with editor Diane Solway and writer-director Lulu Wang on the Chanel Connects podcast. Knightley, who has two children, said she would be interested in doing nude scenes about the complications of motherhood and the bodily changes one undergoes in the process—but not “those horrible sex scenes where you’re all greased up and everyone’s grunting. I’m not interested in doing that.”
“If it was about motherhood—literally about how extraordinary that body is, but how suddenly you’re looking at this body…and it’s changed in ways that are unfathomable to you before you became a mother, then yeah, I’d totally be up for exploring that with a woman who would understand that,” Knightley added. She noted that she’s become “very uncomfortable” doing scenes that amplify the male gaze. Many sex scenes, she said, just boil down to a director needing “somebody to look hot.”
“You can use somebody else, because I’m too vain and the body has had two children now,” Knightley said. “And I’d just rather not stand in front of a group of men naked.”
Earlier in the interview, Knightley spoke about her rise to fame and how shocking it was to be thrust into the public eye, especially once the paparazzi started paying attention her. “It was brutal,” she said. “Being followed around 24/7 by packs of up to 30 men with their lenses through my windows, and being called a whore every time I left the house in order to invoke a reaction because the pictures were worth more if I was crying.”
She also accused the paparazzi of threatening her life while she was driving. “There was a lot of money to be made out of car crashes, so you’d have guys with cameras trying to force your car off the road,” she claimed. Knightley, who rose to fame in films like Pride and Prejudice and the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, said that she’s glad she was able to survive that heady time and stay focused on her career: “It is something I feel very proud of now in my mid-30s.”
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