Keira Finds The Jacket Suits

For teen star Keira Knightley The Jacket offered liberation from a rut of costume drama.

by Amber Wilkinson

Keira Knightley sans corset in The Jacket

Keira Knightley sans corset in The Jacket

Britain's number one female star, Keira Knightley, casts off her corset in time travel thriller The Jacket - which opens in the UK tomorrow - and she can't wait.

In fact, she was so desperate to broaden her range that, after reading the script in Dublin while shooting King Arthur, she practically begged director John Maybury for the part.

"I had about ten scripts," she says, "Nine of them were all exactly the same, were all very good but they pretty much melted into one. They were all basically what I had played before, which is slightly feisty, English, corseted, damsel in distressed types, which is great if you can play it but it gets a bit boring if that's all you're going to do with your career.

"So I read The Jacket. I had to read about four times because it was totally different from all of the others. The character was totally different from anything I've played before and just really, really exciting."

Exciting it may have been, but things didn't exactly go to plan on the day of her audition, when she went down with food poisoning.

"Fish," she says with a wry smile. "I think I can trace it back to fish and a lot of Guinness.

"I was puking at about 4am and I was getting picked up at 6am to get to the airport to get to a lunch meeting. I was puking all the time.

"I rang my mum from the airport and said, 'you've got to meet me, I'm puking, I don't know what to do'. So she met me at Heathrow airport with Pepto Bismol and a plastic bag so that I could be sick.

"I finally get to the meeting and sit down and it's two of the producers and John Maybury and I'm literally green. And they ordered fish for lunch. I'm having to leave the table every ten minutes so that I can puke it all up."

The food poisoning was bad but worse was to come - Maybury didn't want her.

The British director freely admits he had other plans for the part of feisty Jackie Price - a young girl whose life becomes entwined with that of military veteran Jack Starks (Oscar-winner Adrien Brody), who discovers he can time travel while locked up in a mental hospital.

"I really didn't want Keira for the part," 45-year-old Maybury says, cheerfully, "I'd met some amazing American actresses. Because it was my first, in my mind, American film I was very concerned to have an American cast.

"But some of the producers were insistent that I meet this girl because she was box office. The first thing I said was: 'I don't want you for this film and they're making me meet you, so why should I have you?'.

"She said: 'If I don't do your film I'm going to be wearing corsets for the next 20 years. The smartness of that from an 18-year-old. She'd rehearsed some of the scenes and already had this persona down.

"I just realised I had been fooled by the illusion of her work that I'd seen. I realised there was a much deeper, much more intense actor there. She proves that in the film - she's an astonishing actor."

Keira, now 20, clearly remembers it as a day of hell: "I read for it and the fucker didn't say anything, so I got up and started walking to the door and thought 'Oh, this is awful'. Then he said 'Keira, here's my work number, here's my mobile number and I'll see you in about a month'."

The Pirates of the Caribbean star - now back in the corset to shoot the mega-hit's back-to-back sequels - says she found adopting an American accent "incredibly liberating".

"I listened to a lot of Courtney Love and, actually Brittany Murphy and Michelle Pfeiffer as well and we came up with a bit of a concoction of all of them. It really felt like taking away your voice."

The South London actress courted controversy when she stripped off, at just 15, for teen thriller The Hole but says that she wasn't fazed by the sex and nude scenes in The Jacket.

"I'd done nude scenes before but John is a very visual director and he'd given me lots of paintings that were his inspiration - Klimt. So I had visual references, so it almost becomes not your body any more, in a funny way.

"I did say, 'you're not going to film my arse'. I said, 'the top half is fine, the bottom half isn't fine'. But it was cool. It was John, the cameraman and the focus puller, so there were only three people in the room.

"And when we did the sex scene it was exactly the same, it was me and Adrien and three of them in the entire studio. So I felt incredibly protected."

Keira's character's unsettling love affair with Starks will certainly help her shake off the British costume drama tag that she's been labelled with - but what about those corsets?

She shot an adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice after wrapping up the Maybury thriller, and says: "I did that after The Jacket and then went on to Domino, which is out of corsets, and, now, I'm going to do Pirates, which is back in corsets again. One in, one out, I think that's all right."

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