”THE THING ABOUT GREAT FICTIONAL CHARACTERS FROM LITERATURE IS THAT THEY COMPLETELY SPEAK TO WHAT MAKES PEOPLE HUMAN.”

—KIERA KNIGHTLEY

The talented actress Keira Knightley, sports an intense look on the April cover of Interview Magazine. Keira poses for Mert & Marcus’ lens with red lips and tousled tresses for the new issue.

”Discreetly, quietly, and with the sort of delicate earnestness that she does most things, Keira Knightley has emerged as one of her generation’s preeminent period actresses. This, however, is less a comment on Knightley’s predilection for peddling in corsets in films such as Joe Wright’s Pride & Prejudice (2005) and Atonement (2007), for which she has earned both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations, and more one on her faithful, almost throwback, workaday sense of what her job is and how to go about it. Knightley’s film career nominally began a very long time ago in a galaxy far, far away—her first role in a major movie was a part as a handmaiden drafted into serving as an expendable double for Natalie Portman’s Queen Amidala in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999). But in the intervening years, careening between smaller projects like John Maybury’s The Edge of Love (2008) and Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010), and big-budget extravaganzas like the Pirates of the Caribbean films, she has managed to knit together a string of performances that are both emotionally complex and powerfully economical. “I first met Keira when she was 17,” says Wright. “She was a goofy kid then. But she’s always had a fiercely inquisitive nature. It’s been a privilege to bear witness to her development.”

By DAVID CRONENBERG