Keira Knightley with Benedict Cumberbatch in a scene from The Imitation Game. Source: Supplied
“YOU’RE asking if I’ve ever been offered a biopic about a female genius?” Keira Knightley ponders, lounging in her hotel armchair. “No! What is up with that! Go on, you’re a writer, write one. Do it! I would love to play a genius.”
We’re talking about her supporting role in The Imitation Game, one of a spate of movies this year about troubled 20th-century intellectual giants of the male variety.
Benedict Cumberbatch stars as the persecuted World War II codebreaker Alan Turing, with Knightley chipping in as his Bletchley Park colleague Joan Clarke. Soon to reach us, there’s also a Stephen Hawking film (The Theory of Everything), and a Bobby Fischer film (Pawn Sacrifice), all joining a rich tradition of intellectual biopics from The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) to
A Beautiful Mind (2001) and beyond.
These films routinely win awards for their lead actors. But where are the women?
“Who would you do it about?” Knightley asks, in her clipped-consonants, rapid-patter way. “What about the mathematician who’s just won the — God, what’s the biggest maths prize? Fields Medal. What’s her name? That’s even worse! I can’t remember her name.” Alas, the name of the Iranian mathematician Maryam Mirzakhani is not on the tip of either of our tongues.
“We could write it about her … I don’t know if there’s a story. But we could write it about her.”
For the time being, she’ll have to settle for sidekick duties. Joan Clarke may not be the central figure in The Imitation Game, but she was an expert cryptanalyst in her own right. “Pretty f---ing smart,” Knightley agrees, nonchalantly tossing out the expletive. “Double first, that’s not bad, is it?”
Keira Knightley says she would love to play a genius. Source: AP
It takes seconds to warm to the 29-year-old actress, and it would be hard not to. In person, she’s a magnetic combination of finishing-school polish and teasing, one-of-the-lads plainspokenness.
She rarely seems to draw breath, off-screen or on. Morten Tyldum’s film will be Knightley’s fourth to get a cinema release this year, after Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the New York-set indie musical Begin Again and low-budget rom-com Say When. “It’s two years’ work,” she clarifies. “For some reason they’re just all coming out at the same time.” Still, with the big-ticket mountain disaster flick Everest set for next year, it certainly doesn’t feel as if she’s letting the career pace slacken right now. A few years ago, she called herself a workaholic and said she was planning to take some time off. Does the diagnosis still hold?
“Not any more. I used to be. I think, anybody, in any creative field, you understand that if you’re lucky enough there’s a space in the world for you for five seconds, and you have to jam yourself in there, otherwise it closes up and it may never, probably won’t ever, open again.”
Knightley is talking about her run of performances in the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, in between which she fitted Love Actually, King Arthur, The Jacket, Domino, Pride & Prejudice, Silk and Atonement. Kind of a roller-coaster.
“There was a fear that the work would dry up and I just had to take it while it was there,” she says. “Which was true, in a certain sort of way, but then I got to the end of that and was just exhausted.
“Also, with acting or anything creative, you have to be living a bit of a life outside of just a film set in order to be getting better, or bringing something interesting, or reflecting the world around you. If the world around you is just a film set, that’s a bit of a bubble.”
Keira Knightley during the International Film Festival in Toronto, in 2008. Source: AP
Keira Knightley knows how to strike a pose. Source: AP
Even before The Imitation Game premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in August, expectations were high. Knightley is widely tipped to get a Supporting Actress nomination at next year’s Oscars (her first nomination since Pride & Prejudice in 2006), and Cumberbatch — a close friend — is sure to be in the mix for Best Actor.
Does she find all the awards speculation helpful, or a bit of a sideshow? “I don’t know. It’s really hard to get people to see films, particularly when they’re independent films. So any hype you can get in whatever direction, if people are at least noticing that it’s out, then that’s great. It just means it’s managing to work, in some way.”
The Imitation Game has lured her back into one of her favourite eras, the ‘40s, after Atonement and the underrated Dylan Thomas biopic The Edge of Love (2008), in which she gave one of her most arresting and drop-dead-gorgeous performances. This time, her look isn’t so much glamorous Blitz eveningwear as bluestocking chic. She gets some lovely cardigans. “I do like the ‘40s. I like British films of that period because they’re so alien to what film is now. I suppose it’s do with conflict zones, and how behaviours change. You have this image of a very proper, very uptight society, but the fact is that STDs were going through the roof, and women were having babies outside marriage and everything. Suddenly you see it in a completely different context.”
Knightley really goes for the plummy vowels as Clarke, stretching her vocals in an enjoyably camp way. She says that the process of finding Clarke’s voice “made me laugh. It’s taken from an interview I saw with her — not that I thought she was funny, but she was incredibly feminine.
“I liked the idea that you have a character who is trying to break down doors and get into places, but she’s not doing it like a bull in a china shop. I’m coming at you from a side angle, and suddenly I’m allowed in the room and allowed to do the job I want to do. That was a very smart move.”
© TIM ROBEY / TELEGRAPH MEDIA GROUP LIMITED 2014
The Imitation Game will close the Emirates British Film Festival on Wednesday at Palace Brighton Bay, Palace Cinema Como and Palace Balwyn. It will be released nationally on January 1.
britishfilmfestival.com.au
Originally published as Keira ‘would love to play a genius’
