Keira Knightley on Why She Won't Film Nude Scenes With Male Directors

 

By Zoe Papadakis

Keira Knightley has revealed that she refuses to do nude scenes with male directors. Opening up in an interview for the "Chanel Connects" podcast, the actress admitted her decision was driven partly by "vanity" and also by the "male gaze."

"I don't have an absolute ban, but I kind of do with men," she said.

Knightley said under certain circumstances she would consider filming a nude scene, but she has her boundaries. "If it was about motherhood and literally about how extraordinary that body is, but how suddenly you're looking at this body that you've got to know and is your own and it's seen in this completely different way ... then yeah, I would totally be up for kind of exploring that with a woman who would understand that," she said. "But I feel very uncomfortable now trying to portray the male gaze."

"The Pirates of the Caribbean" star added that she was also not interested in participating in "those horrible sex scenes where you're all greased up and everybody's grunting."

"There's times where I go, 'Yeah, I completely see where this sex scene would be really good in this film, and you basically just need somebody to look hot, and so, therefore, you can use somebody else,'" she continued. "Because I'm too vain, and the body has had two children now, and I'd just rather not stand in front of a group of men naked."

In a previous interview on "The Jonathan Ross Show," while discussing her 2015 movie "Domino," Knightley admitted she had body doubles film her nude scenes and even picked out who would be posing as her.

"I have this policy in films where I say, 'You can have the top half but you can't have the bottom half,' and it kind of works quite well," she said, per Daily Mail. "And there was this scene in 'Domino' where I was meant to do a bit of a striptease and a dance with a thong on. A sexy thong dance, and I was just like, 'It's not going to happen.' And so I said, 'Could you get me a bottom please?'" she continued.

"And so I went into a room with Tony Scott, the director, and these three women came in and just dropped their trousers and he was like, 'Well, which one do you want?' And how do you say to the bottom double, do you say, 'Well I don't want that one, that one's crap,' well obviously you don't because the woman's standing there. You can't be rude."

Knightley added that she was looking for a double whose body closely resembled her own to make the scene more believable. "I was just looking for one that's around the same shape as mine, just a bit better," she said. "So there was one that was really amazing and I was like, 'No one's going to believe that.'"