The character Keira Knightley admitted was a MacGuffin: “A damsel in distress?”
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(Credit: Alamy)
The mid-2000s weren’t kind to a lot of celebrities. Just ask English actor Keira Knightley, who felt so savaged by the tabloid press at the time she came down with a serious case of Imposter Syndrome. Knightley has since grown in confidence, perhaps partly thanks to frequently choosing to play female characters that strive to succeed in societies pitted against them. Not every role she’s taken on is flawlessly feminist, though, but Knightley is shrewd enough to cop to this fact.
While she had a small part as Natalie Portman’s royal double in Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, Knightley really hit the big time as Elisabeth Swann in the Pirates Of The Caribbean series from 2003 onwards. A global star-making turn for the actor, it had the double-edged effect of pigeon-holing Knightley into the ‘prim and proper’ upper-class English stereotype people assumed of her in real life. Swann is still plucky enough to swashbuckle with the boys, but Knightley later reflected that she’d felt too objectified playing her, motivating her to seek out different kinds of roles next.
Though frequently returning to her safe haven of period dramas, such as The Duchess, Pride & Prejudice, and Anna Karenina, Knightley has consistently spiced things up with thrillers and more action-oriented parts. She plastered herself in war paint to play Celtic battle maiden Guinevere in 2004’s King Arthur and was well-cast as Domino Harvey, the real-life English girl who left a charmed life to become a hardened American bounty hunter, in Tony Scott’s 2006 film Domino.
As with Elisabeth Swann, Knightley gave these physically demanding parts her all, keen to be taken seriously as an actor with the elasticity to do whatever she wanted. Neither King Arthur nor Domino were commercial or critical hits, but her work in them still landed her a part in Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit. In the 2014 film, Chris Pine is the fourth actor to play the titular Tom Clancy character, rebooting the long-running film series and, to date, leaving it at an end. Knightley plays Dr. Catherine Muller, Ryan’s fiancée, whose importance in the film ends up getting boiled down to a typical kidnapping plot.
Talking to The Independent around the time of Shadow Recruit’s release, Knightley got candid about Cathy’s real utility in the film. “She’s definitely the MacGuffin [a Hitchcockian plot device]. Not the only MacGuffin. But she’s one of the MacGuffins. Is she a strong character? Yeah. Is she a damsel in distress? Yeah.”
Here, Knightley defends her decision to play Cathy by describing her as “strong” and, therefore, in line with the kinds of female characters she usually chooses. However, she also doesn’t shy away from dressing down faults in the characterisation. “[I wanted to] get to do something that was lighter,” she elaborates about her decision to accept the part, calling the film the kind of pure “popcorn” entertainment she hadn’t done, at that point, for close to a decade.
Knightley has slipped exclusively and comfortably into biographical projects in the last ten years, expanding her range and strength as a performer even more. We can’t rule out the possibility of her craving something lighter again and reaching for the guns or swords once more in the future.
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