Keira Knightley is known for being part of one of the world’s most successful movie franchises, Pirates of the Caribbean, and her starring role alongside Johnny Depp arguably helped solidify her as a major actress.

Despite the franchise’s popularity, Keira admits her life wasn’t rosy after being catapulted into fame.

She recently opened up about what her experience was like after the films came out, admitting it’s likely not what many fans assumed.

While the newfound fame may have been great for her career, it wasn’t positive mental health-wise, and Keira admits she struggled to handle it.

Keira Struggled To Handle Early Fame

“I can deal with it now, and that’s great. But at the time, it was not so great, and it took many years of therapy to figure it out,” she told The Telegraph.

This wasn’t the first time Keira commented on the difficulty of fame from Pirates. In 2016, she told Vanity Fair that she did “many years of therapy” to help her navigate life in the public eye.

“I’m not an extrovert, so I found that level of scrutiny and that level of fame really hard,” she said, noting the experience was “pretty horrific.” “It was an age where you are becoming, you haven’t become, and you need to make mistakes. It’s a very precarious age, particularly for women.”

Keira added, “You’re in some ways still a child. It was traumatic, but it set up the rest of my career.”

Why Keira Resented Her ‘Pirates’ Role

She made similar remarks just last year to Variety, claiming that she felt objectified and type cast due to her role as Pirates’ Elizabeth Swann, something she failed to see coming before singing onto the project.

“I had quite an entrance into adult life, an extreme landing because of the experience of fame at a very early age,” she told the publication. “There’s a funny place where women are meant to sit, publicly, and I never felt comfortable with that. It was a big jolt.”

“[Elizabeth Swann] was the object of everybody’s lust,” the British native went on. “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.”

She continued. “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.”

The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, launched in 2003 with The Curse of the Black Pearl, became a monumental success in the film industry. The series, known for its adventurous plot and memorable characters, grossed over $4.5 billion worldwide, making it one of the highest-grossing film series of all time.

For Keira Knightley, the franchise was a significant career booster, catapulting her to international stardom. Her participation in the franchise garnered not only her widespread recognition but also substantial financial earnings, solidifying her status as a leading actress in Hollywood, something that can’t be denied even if the role had unintended consequences on her personal life.