Keira Knightley says she felt ‘caged’ after starring in Pirates of the Caribbean

Actor also said she was ‘incredibly hard on myself’ in her twenties

Keira Knightley has said she felt “caged” after being in the blockbuster film franchise Pirates of the Caribbean.

The double Oscar nominee, 37, starred in the first film, The Curse of the Black Pearl, in 2003, alongside Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom.

She played heroine Elizabeth Swann in that movie and three sequels.

Her character goes through a transition from daughter of a gentlemen to pirate while pursuing a romance with Bloom’s character Will Turner, a blacksmith’s apprentice, until her last outing in 2017’s Dead Men Tell No Tales.

She told Harper’s Bazaar UK: “[Elizabeth] was the object of everybody’s lust, 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. It very much felt like I was caged in a thing I didn’t understand.”

After first rising to fame in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace and football comedy Bend It Like Beckham, Knightley has starred in many period dramas as well as romantic comedies such as Love Actually.

She received Oscar nods for 2005’s Pride & Prejudice, when she played Elizabeth Bennet in the regency period drama comedy, and 2014’s The Imitation Game, a biopic about Alan Turing set during World War Two.

Knightley said she had an “extreme landing” into fame which she has “never felt comfortable” with.

Johnny Depp and Knightley in ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ (Disney)

She also said: “I was incredibly hard on myself, I was never good enough, I was utterly single-minded, I was so ambitious, I was so driven.

“I was always trying to get better and better and improve, which is an exhausting way to life your life. I am in awe of my 22-year-old self, because I’d like a bit more of her back.

“And it’s only by not being like that any longer that I realise how extraordinary it was. There was never an ounce of me that wasn’t going to find a way through.”

Since having children, she said she feels the “heavy lifting” of parenting “has to be acknowledged” and the “vital” and “hard work” that people provide should stop being “undervalued”.

Knightley also said: “During filming, the hours are unpredictable and extreme. I worked out I needed three people to do what one full-time parent did.

“When you hear somebody say, ‘I’m just staying home with the kids,’ that’s not a ‘just’. That’s a huge thing.”

Her upcoming roles include starring in true crime film Boston Strangler, where she plays American journalist Loretta McLaughlin, who covered the serial killer in the 1960s.

Additional reporting by Press Association