The cruel director who owed Keira Knightley an apology: “I’m ashamed of myself”

With two nominations apiece from the Academy Awards and the Baftas and four nods from the Golden Globes across two decades, her peers have repeatedly recognised Keira Knightley as a great actor over an extended period of time. She used to be a movie star, too, but she’s no longer interested in that side of the industry.

While it might be interpreted as disparaging to say somebody used to be a star, but they’re not anymore, it was a decision Knightley made on her own. It was a perfectly understandable one, too, after her breakthrough performance in Bend It Like Beckham snowballed into her coronation as one of Hollywood’s brightest young prospects.

To put it into context, Knightley had appeared in the initial Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, Richard Curtis’ Love Actually, Antoine Fuqua’s blockbuster period piece King Arthur by the time she was 22. Her first Oscar-nominated performance in Atonement came immediately afterwards, and it was a turning point.

The intense and often unforgiving scrutiny she was placed under by the media helped influence her call to shy away from the mainstream in favour of taking more complex, challenging, and introspective roles that would challenge her as a performer. Nonetheless, one director decided to launch an unprovoked verbal assault that reflected the worst of what she went through in the public eye.

John Carney helmed 2013’s musical dramedy Begin Again, which turned a tidy profit at the box office and won stellar reviews from critics. And yet, for whatever reason, he repeatedly criticised Knightley’s performance in public and said he enjoyed making his follow-up feature, Sing Street, even more, because “it’s a small personal movie with no Keira Knightleys in it.”

Continuing to dig himself a hole, Carney explained to The Independent that “the real problem was that Keira wasn’t a singer and wasn’t a guitar player, and it’s very hard to make music seem real if it’s not with musicians,” which was an unusual criticism for him to make when he was the one who cast her in the role.

“I don’t want to rubbish Keira,” he clarified before immediately rubbishing her. “But, you know, it’s hard being a film actor, and it requires a certain level of honesty and self-analysis that I don’t think she’s ready for yet, and I certainly don’t think she was ready for on that film.” Summing up the experience, Carney was adamant that he “learned that I’ll never make a film with supermodels again.”

Obviously, Knightley started her acting career as a child and was never and has never been a supermodel. When the inevitable backlash started, the filmmaker took to social media and shared that he was “ashamed of myself that I could say such things and I’ve been trying to account for what they say about me.”

Carney would then “unreservedly apologise” to Knightley, her friends, and anyone else who took offence to the Begin Again director openly lambasting the actor for no apparent reason other than his dissatisfaction with how his film turned out, even though most people who saw it seemed to like it a lot.