Five minutes later, out of breath and sweating (always the suave way to greet a movie star) and still reeling from my encounter with Mr. Jones, I was ushered in to "Pirates of the Caribbean" star's eighth floor suite. She had a "what's wrong?" look in her eyes and I feared I might be quickly ushered out. But I told the 22-year-old actress that I had just come from a tough interview with a difficult actor.
"I hope you're nicer," I said.
"I'm not, I'm a bitch," she replied, icily. "Why was he tough?"
"He doesn't give you much," I said nervously, fearing a repeat. "You get very short answers."
"Well, I rattle on and on," she said, brightening. "How short?"
"One or two words."
"Wow, that's short. . . . I guess he's been burned a lot."
"I don't think he could have been burned more than you." (Knightley is frequently tabloid fodder due to her slender frame.)
"He might have perceived it differently," she said, laughing. "You never know."
"Anyway, let's talk about you," moving my tape recorder closer to the now-cheery actress, curled up on a couch with a bowl of beautiful berries on the table in front of her. "A few years ago you came through Philadelphia with Parminder Nagra for 'Bend It Like Beckham' and you were the new kid on the block. Could you ever have imagined, in your wildest, most ambitious dreams, that this is where you'd be a few years later?"
"I don't know," she said. "I always hoped that I'd be doing good work. I would have thought that I'd done theater by now. So, no. I've been incredibly lucky. Mostly because the films I've done - some of them - have actually been successful, and that's extraordinary. And you can't ever prepare for that. It's easy to say with hindsight that, yes, you made some very good decisions, but at the time, you never know what's going to work and what isn't."
"Even 'Pirates' could have . . ."
