So you’re in a rock band? So you’re an actor on a film set? It won’t impress Keira Knightley much. She is tired. Of fame, fortune and most definitely of music. The rocker’s wife tells Loaded she’s lucky she has dodged the live-fast, die-young lifestyle of musicians on the road, and insists her life is far from glamorous.
“I have no natural affinity for music. At all,” Knightley tells Loaded. She’s said it plenty of times up to now – but she’s keen to use this interview to make the point again. Saying you’re not a music fan as a way of promoting a new music-themed flick in which you star as a guitar-playing singer songwriter is definitely a new one. But Knightley can get away with it. Just.
It’s still quite a galling statement once you’ve seen the film in question, Begin Again. Because despite her self-confessed lack of musical understanding, she can sing beautifully. But she wants to put to bed rumours she’s now looking to begin again as a musician. Begin Again, which also stars Mark Ruffalo, James Corden and Maroon 5’s Adam Levine, rests on the believability of Knightley’s character Greta.
All the adjectives regularly used to describe the actress – coltish, indie, natural, pouting – are a casting director’s wet-dream when it comes to putting a fragile singing character on screen. And she assumes the role of the starving, strumming, singing artist well.
As a viewer it’s easy to believe you’re watching a real, struggling songbird from New York’s East Village, and not the lass you saw (and most likely fancied) in Bend It Like Beckham, Pirates Of The Caribbean, Never Let Me Go or, if you were unlucky, panned bounty hunter flick Domino.
Knightley has sung on screen before, in historical drama The Edge Of Love. But it was a very different affair and not something that defined her character in that, Vera. Knightley, who turned 29 in March, tells Loaded it took a lot of work to find her voice again, for Begin Again.
“I’m so not musical in any way,” she explains again about her indifference to music. “I don’t really listen to it, I don’t really remember it and part of the reason that I wanted to do this film was to try and get into that mindset.”
She’s about the only person in her family who isn’t into music. Her brother is a sound engineer, her sister-in-law is a virtuoso violinist and her 30-year-old husband, James Righton, is, of course, one of the Klaxons. “I definitely wasn’t a teenager writing lyrics or anything. I was too busy reading Pride And Prejudice,” Knightley adds.
Thanks to a string of period dramas, and her roles in Atonement, The Edge Of Love and Never Let Me Go, she has become the poster girl for a certain type of dark, fragile and brooding character in intense films.
“After Anna Karenina, I was very aware that there had been a five-year period of work that was very dark,” she says. “I wanted something very different to that and I wanted something that had hope in it, because I don’t think any of the things I’d done before had hope in them. I think hope is a very difficult thing to put into films, actually, without being hugely cheesy. That was something Bend It Like Beckham achieved. It was a very hopeful piece, and I didn’t want to go and do something like that. I did want to find some sense of hope in whatever I did.”
Begin Again is the latest film from John Carney. He wrote and directed the piece, as he did with Once – the 2006 indie gem that went on to win an Oscar for its stars Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova. As with Dublin-based Once, Begin Again isn’t a musical in the traditional sense. Song doesn’t suddenly ejaculate from characters who seem bursting to communicate their heart’s desires. Instead, music is central to the film’s plot and people.
Also like Once the songs in Begin Again aren’t embarrassing covers or cynical star vehicles, but believable and written carefully for the film. In one tune Lost Stars, Knightley sounds not unlike real-life artists Lucy Rose (Warwickshire-born singer-songwriter) or even Norah Jones. You can imagine actually wanting to listen to the song outside the context of the film.
It starts with her character Greta performing in a small dive bar and being watched by Ruffalo’s Dan, a music label executive in the bar to drown his sorrows after a row with his wife (Christine Keener.) He’s confident he can make Greta a star. She initially rejects his offer of help but changes her mind.
Off-stage, Greta has just split with her long-term boyfriend and songwriting partner (Levine), and is planning on leaving New York for good. Eventually Dan persuades her to pursue a record deal and they meet Dan’s friend Saul (played by rapper Yasiin Bey/Mos Def.)
Among other things, Begin Again is about the idea of fame, and at what cost it comes. Greta battles to hang onto her pretty old-fashioned ideas about the notion of selling out and a distrust of huge corporations. Her ex-boyfriend in the film, however, has no such qualms and is ruthlessly ambitious.
The nature of being thrust into the fame spotlight is something Knightley will have pondered too, being one of today’s most-photographed stars. But she claims she doesn’t see the parallels between her own career and that of her character’s fame.
“It’s very different to my situation,” she says. “Because I was at 17 or 18 (when she had her big Bend It Like Beckham break.) It’s a very different thing from someone like Greta who’s in their early-30s and has been working for at least 10 years trying to make their dream. I was very introverted when I was 18, and I hadn’t had years of saying, ‘Why isn’t anybody taking notice? Why don’t they realise?’ My situation was more, ‘Oh, fuck, that’s just happened and how do I deal with that? Oh shit I can’t go outside anymore’.”
She then hints her husband handles fame better. “I think it’s a very different thing for male bands, male folk,” she goes on. They get adulation on stage and they might get a couple of people outside, but they’re not dealing with a media that is obsessed with female celebrity.”
Asked if she can remember the first time she felt famous, Knightley is cagey. “Luckily it was so long ago that I can’t remember what it was like when it happened. But I’m still here, I’m still alive and I’m not a drug addict so it must have been all right.”
