Keira Knightley Has Mixed Feelings About the “Pirates of the Caribbean” Movies: 'I Was Seen as S--- Because of Them'

“It’s a funny thing when you have something that was making and breaking you at the same time,” the actress told 'The Times'

Looking back on the Pirates of the Caribbean movies two decades later, Keira Knightley seems to have very mixed feelings about the franchise that shot her to stardom.

“It’s a funny thing when you have something that was making and breaking you at the same time,” the actress told The Times in a profile published on Saturday, Nov. 23. “I was seen as s--- because of them, and yet because they did so well I was given the opportunity to do the films that I ended up getting Oscar nominations for.”

Knightley was just 18 when Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl premiered in 2003, and had previously appeared in a handful of British film and TV roles, most notably in 1999’s Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace and 2002’s Bend It Like Beckham. But the massive success of the first Pirates film, based on the Disney theme park ride, made her a major Hollywood star.

In the years that followed, she would star in 2005’s Pride and Prejudice, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress, and in 2007’s Atonement, which was nominated for Best Picture at the 2008 Oscars. She would also return to the role of Elizabeth Swann in two back-to-back Pirates sequels. But while Black Pearl was largely well-received by critics, 2006’s Dead Man’s Chest and 2007’s At World’s End got a chillier response.

“They were the most successful films I’ll ever be a part of and they were the reason that I was taken down publicly,” Knightley, 39, told The Times. “So they’re a very confused place in my head.”

The actress ultimately skipped 2011’s Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and only appeared in a cameo in 2017's Dead Men Tell No Tales, neither of which fared particularly well with critics.

Knightley previously expressed ambivalence about her Pirates character last year.

“[Elizabeth Swann] was the object of everybody’s lust,” she told Harper’s Bazaar U.K. “Not that she doesn’t have a lot of fight in her. But it was interesting coming from being really tomboyish to getting projected as quite the opposite. I felt very constrained. I felt very stuck. So the roles afterwards were about trying to break out of that.”

“I didn’t have a sense of how to articulate it,” she added. “It very much felt like I was caged in a thing I didn’t understand.”

Knightley, who stars in the upcoming Netflix spy series Black Doves, told The Times she’s not interested in appearing in another film franchise after her experience on the Pirates films. “The hours are insane. It’s years of your life, you have no control over where you’re filming, how long you’re filming, what you’re filming,” she said.