“I’m sorry, but that would have to be with a female filmmaker.”
Keira Knightley has said in an interview that she refuses to appear in sex scenes directed by men.
Speaking on a CHANEL Connects podcast, the Pirate of the Caribbean star said that it was “partly vanity and also it’s the male gaze”.
“If I was making a story that was about that journey of motherhood and body [acceptance] I feel like, I’m sorry, but that would have to be with a female filmmaker,” Knightley explained. “I don’t have an absolute ban, but I kind of do with men.
“I don’t want it to be those horrible sex scenes where you’re all greased up and everybody is grunting. I’m not interested in doing that.”
“I feel very uncomfortable now trying to portray the male gaze,” she continued.
“Saying that, there’s times where I go, ‘Yeah, I completely see where this sex would be really good in this film and you basically just need somebody to look hot’. So therefore you can use somebody else, because I’m too vain and my body has had two children now and I’d just rather not stand in front of a group of men naked.”
Knightley has two children with her husband James Righton of the band Klaxons.
She started acting as a child, but made her breakthrough in 2002 in Bend It Like Beckham. Knightley then came to international fame playing Elizabeth Swan in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl in 2003, and returned for several of the sequels.
Most recently Knightley was seen in Misbehaviour alongside Jessie Buckley and Gugu Mbatha-Raw, about the 1970 Miss World competition.
