The last time we saw Keira Knightley, if you live in a city with the latest billboards, she was naked, covering her breasts with a bowler hat and promoting Coco Mademoiselle perfume. Today, she's curled up demurely on the couch of a Toronto hotel room talking about the perils of celebrity and the rewards of acting.
"At the moment it's all good because the work's good," says the 22-year-old actress, an ethereal beauty whose famous blonde slimness has excited the world of celebrity magazines with (hotly denied) rumours of eating disorders. "My job is to act. My job is to provide as entertaining fictions as I can do. My job is to find reality in stories. And sometimes I'm going to be good and sometimes I'm going to be bad. And when I'm bad, that's not good."
When she's good, on the other hand, she's terrific: nominated for an Academy Award for her performance as Elizabeth Bennet in Joe Wright's Pride & Prejudice, and exciting more Oscar talk for her turn as another romantic leading lady, this time in Wright's Atonement, based on Ian McEwan's best-seller about love and tragedy in the years of the Second World War.
And while Knightley cannot completely get past the celebrity side of her life - "when you've got people in your personal space 24/7 it's pretty hard to ignore," she says - she says she's passionate about acting and right now, the good outweighs the bad.
In Atonement, which is a special presentation at the Toronto film festival, she plays Cecilia, a spoiled rich girl on an English estate in 1935 who eventually gives in to the love of a poor boy, the housekeeper's son (played by James McAvoy), only to see their affair torn apart by the war. There's a modern twist as well: McEwan has provided a meta-fictional structure in which Atonement becomes a story about stories, but Knightley says it was the old-fashioned aspects of the book that attracted her.
"As far as '40s filmmaking in Hollywood goes, if you're talking about romantic comedy, that was the peak and the best of the romantic comedies because they weren't sentimental. They were witty. And I personally enjoy that a lot more than the incredibly indulgent sentimentality we go for today. I love the wit. I love the characters in The Philadelphia Story or His Girl Friday.
"As far as British film goes, I'm fascinated by David Lean and Noel Coward. Brief Encounter has been a huge favourite of mine for a long time. When Joe Wright told me he wanted to go back to that 1940 style of acting, that '40s English accent which in my generation has disappeared, that really excited me."
Knightley demonstrates the accent she means: a clipped, nasal way of speaking that helps define Cecilia as one of those women who could barely open her mouth because of the stiffness of her upper lip.
The accent helped her create the character: "I looked at her as a pressure cooker. She's just waiting to explode. She is directionless, and I think that sort of machine-gun pattern of speech helps make it not completely comfortable."
The film, like the book, is designed to keep audiences slightly on edge.
Part of that comes in the fact that Atonement is a fiction within a fiction. Knightley says that although the performers couldn't play that irony - they had to do their parts straight to make it believable - it is in a way what she does every day as a performer. "You're dealing with different people, and they're not realities, but you have to make them real. Which is what this book, in kind of a funny way, deals with. What is fiction and what is fact."
That's especially true of another Knightley movie at the Toronto festival, Silk, a romance set in the 1880s in which she plays Helene, the wife of a businessman (Michael Pitt) who is having an affair with a woman in Japan.
"I wanted to play two very mature roles," she says of Silk and Atonement, which she filmed back-to-back. "It was my break from Pirates of the Caribbean," the trilogy of Johnny Depp adventures that have made her one of the hottest stars in movies and most sought-after interviews at the Toronto festival.
Knightley says she took on the Silk character because it was different. Usually, she tends toward what she calls "Joan of Arc" roles. "I like strident strong women, and I think I was very aware that I was doing a lot of very strong women, and perhaps I should try something else."
She was fascinated by the fact that Helene was selfless, giving her husband whatever he needed despite the fact that she knew he was having an affair.
"It's someone I'm not like at all. I can't understand that kind of selflessness. I find that completely fascinating. And then doing that right next to Cecilia, who is this very brittle kind of selfish character, was really interesting as well."
Knightley won't say she's closer to Cecilia, but she does say that the Atonement heroine is a woman who is easy for audiences to understand. "We're all (awful) on days. It doesn't matter whether you're nice people or good people. It doesn't mean you can't have days when you're just being a bitch to absolutely everybody. And you can even know you're being horrendous but you can't stop yourself. So I think that with Cecilia, it was easier to understand where she's coming from than someone who was that completely selfless."
