Keira Knightley has revealed she would wear the same clothes every day in order to devalue pictures taken by paparazzi, after photographers shouted offensive slurs at her in an attempt to provoke a reaction.
The actor became the subject of tabloid fascination after the first film in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise made her a global star in 2003 at the age of 18.
Speaking in a new interview with The Times, Knightley said of the intrusion: “I went mad.” She recalled the paparazzi abuse, saying: “It was mostly ‘wh***’. ‘Sl**’ 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.
“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 [Spears] shaved her head so it was like, ‘Great — we can push them into doing something f***ing crazy,’” she continued of the paparazzi.
Knightley said her own response was to start “wearing the same clothes every day” to reduce the value of any photographs taken of her, settling on a wardrobe consisting of “three pairs of the same jeans, stripy T-shirt, boots.
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“I gave all my other clothes away,” she admitted.
She added: “And then, if I was being followed, I stopped walking. I’d literally stand there. Stock still. One day, I stood there for five hours. ‘If you’re still there, I’m not going. I’m not going to move’… it wasn’t a valuable shot to them if it was always me in the same clothes, standing still. 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.”
Knightley, who is currently appearing in the Netflix film The Woman in Cabin 10, said she contemplated quitting acting and traveled through Europe by train in order to keep a low profile.
“I was very good,” she recalled. “Museums, trains… no one expects to see you there. I was very scruffy, which they also wouldn’t have expected. You just don’t make eye contact, go a bit hunched. I kind of slithered.”
Knightley’s comments come a week after she said she “was not aware” of calls to boycott J.K. Rowling for her views about transgender people before signing up to voice a character in the forthcoming Harry Potter audiobook series.
She will voice Dolores Umbridge in the new audiobook series being produced by Audible and Pottermore Publishing.
The series boasts a full cast, original music and real-world sound capture to create an immersive audio experience.
