When Keira Knightley wielded nunchucks in a period costume

Posted On September 1, 2024September 1, 2024

Keira Knightley was just 17 years old when she landed the role of Elizabeth Swann in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. The movie turned her into a household name and spawned a franchise, but it also left the actor feeling unfulfilled. After the first Pirates movie, in which she plays the well-worn role of a damsel in distress waiting for the men to duke it out and ferry her safety, she insisted that should there be a sequel, she would get a sword to go along with it. As a result, she starred in the two subsequent Pirates films, seeing Knightley parrying, stabbing, and slashing her way to safety, leaving no character or audience member to underestimate her skills with a blade. 

Shortly after her rapid rise to stardom, Knightley began to seek smaller productions that would test her range as an actor. In the decades since, she has become known more for period dramas like Atonement and Anna Karenina than swashbuckling action movies. Still, there was a period when the two worlds collided – almost literally – and Knightley found herself doing martial arts while dressed as a Jane Austen character.

It was the early 2000s, and Knightley had signed on to be in Joe Wright’s adaptation of Pride & Prejudice and Tony Scott’s biopic of the real-life model-turned-bounty hunter Domino Harvey. The latter was, not surprisingly, a physically demanding role that required Knightley to learn new forms of combat before the project went into production.

“They got me a trainer who would come down at 4:30 in the morning before I went to set to work on Pride and Prejudice and jog with me,” she told an interviewer during the press junket for the film. “And then they gave me some nunchucks and said, ‘Play with those.’ So, I was in my Jane Austen costume on the side of the set, practising my nunchucks. I did that and a bit of weight training because I wanted to look like I could be a bounty hunter. I didn’t do as much as I’d have liked.”

Knightley’s role in Domino could not be more different from the staid, romantic world of Pride & Prejudice. As the titular bounty hunter, she is a casually aggressive tomboy with perfect aim, heavy eyeliner, and a closely-shorn haircut. Instead of swooning in a field with Matthew Macfadayan at sunrise or giggling with Rosamund Pike about her true love, she’s kicking down doors with Mickey Rourke and Édgar Ramírez and wielding a machine gun.

When asked if the juxtaposition of the two films was tricky to pull off, Knightley said, “I nearly failed completely. I got completely freaked out. [Scott] would be phoning me when I was on the set of Pride & Prejudice trying to talk about Domino, and I nearly had a meltdown.” In the end, she took matters into her own hands. On her day off from the set, she walked past a hairdresser’s and, on impulse, chopped all her hair off. “Suddenly, I was looking in the mirror, and I didn’t see Lizzie Bennett anymore. I could actually get my head into Domino.”

Throughout her career, Knightley has been accused by some critics of having a limited acting range, but all you need to do to dispel those prejudices, shall we say, is watch Pride & Prejudice and Domino back-to-back and contemplate what it must have been like to be working on them at the same time. If the members of the Academy had done that, Knightley might have won the Oscar she was nominated for that year. Now, we just have to keep our fingers crossed for some behind-the-scenes footage.

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