Director John Carney bashes Keira Knightley’s acting in Begin Again.
Rarely do you ever hear a director bash an actor’s acting process, especially after they have worked together. However, writer-director John Carney didn’t hold back his words when he recalled working with Keira Knightley on the 2014 movie Begin Again.
Keira Knightley is one of Hollywood’s biggest actresses. She is known for her roles in Pirates of the Caribbean, The Imitation Game and Pride & Prejudice. You would assume she would be an amazing actress. But, one director thinks she’s a horrible actress.
“I’ll never make a film with supermodels again,” the Irish director told the UK’s Independent in a recent interview, saying the model turned actress was a distraction on set.
He went on to criticize the two-time Oscar nominee’s acting skills. “I don’t want to rubbish Keira, 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,” Carney said.
Carney is currently promoting his new movie musical Sing Street, which is in select theaters. During the interview he said Knightely became “disenchanted” during the production of Begin Again.
“…Not that I didn’t enjoy ‘Begin Again,’ but Keira has an entourage that follow her everywhere so it’s very hard to get any real work done,” he said, adding that he yearned to return to Ireland to “make films that nobody cared about.”
According to Carney, Knightley’s “real problem” was that she did not know how to sing or play guitar. “It’s very hard to make music seem real if it’s not with musicians. And I think the audience struggled a little bit with that in ‘Begin Again.’”
Carney did say he loved working with Mark Ruffalo calling the actor “fantastic” and said Adam Levine was “a joy to work with.”
But he also took poked fun at Knightley: “Keira’s thing is to hide who you are and I don’t think you can be an actor and do that… It’s not like I hate the Hollywood thing but I like to work with curious, proper film actors as opposed to movie stars.”
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