Though she’s of course an Academy Award-nominated actor, Keira Knightley’s most important role is mom. And since the birth of her first child in 2015, she has had a “no nudity clause” in her film contracts. She is, however, open to doing on-camera nudity in the future, under one condition: the director would have to be female.
“I don’t have an absolute ban [on filming nude scenes], but I kind of do with men,” she tells the Chanel Connects Podcast. “It’s partly vanity and also it’s the male gaze… 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.”
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But Knightley also acknowledges that in certain films, nudity can add dramatic value. “There’s times where I go, ’Yeah, I completely see where this sex would be really good in this film,’ ” she adds. Ultimately, it comes down to what will best serve the storytelling.
It’s the same reason the actor feels that, for films focused on the female experience, it’s important they be helmed by a female director.
“If it was about motherhood, about how extraordinary that body is, about how suddenly you’re looking at this body that you’ve [gotten] to know and is your own and it’s seen in a completely different way and it’s changed in ways which are unfathomable to you before you become a mother, then yeah, I would totally be up for exploring that with a woman who would understand that,” she says. “But I feel very uncomfortable now trying to portray the male gaze.”
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