Keira Knightley Laggies, Keira Knightley doesn’t wear a corset in her new movie “Laggies” or play a character who lives in the 19th century. She plays a lively, goofy 28-year-old who’s having a hard time acting her age in modern-day Seattle. It’s the actress’s third role so far this year as a normal, contemporary woman, after years developing a specialty in dressing up in period pieces such as “Pride & Prejudice,” “Anna Karenina,” and “The Duchess.”
Audiences seem to welcome the more casual Keira, as if she’s returned from the rarefied land of costume drama to put on jeans and a T-shirt and just hang out with us. In July, when she portrayed a perky singer-songwriter in “Begin Again,” one journalist even wrote that it was as if her career itself was beginning again.
“My dad actually texted me. He said, apparently you’re having a renaissance at 29!” she says. “Fantastic! I mean, yeah, sure, I’ll take it. I didn’t realize I’d gone away, though. I didn’t realize I needed a renaissance. F—! Nobody told me,” she says, her Londoner’s pronunciation (ren-NAY-saunce) crashing against her expletive.
In “Laggies,” which opens Oct. 24, Ms. Knightley plays Megan Burch, who despite having a sharp mind and a graduate degree, has no idea what she wants to do. Her job is standing by the road twirling a sign advertising her father’s accounting business (Dad, played by Jeff Garlin, thinks his unmotivated little girl can do no wrong). When her longtime boyfriend (Mark Webber) proposes, Megan panics and becomes a runaway fiancée. She finds sanctuary in the home of Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz), a 16-year-old she bonds with outside a liquor store after Annika asks Megan to buy beer for her underage friends. Annika lives with her steady but unhappy single dad (Sam Rockwell), who ends up getting to know the new houseguest.
The film, directed by Lynn Shelton (“Your Sister’s Sister”) from a script by Andrea Seigel, taps into the modern anomie that many young adults face as they stare into the void of the future and contemplate their purpose.
“I think a lot of the pressure is that now you’re meant to love what you do,” Ms. Knightley observes.
One might ask how Ms. Knightley relates to someone with murky career aspirations. Her father was an actor, her mother an actress/playwright and she was bred in the business. She asked for an agent at age 3, was on TV by 8, and had a bit part in “Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace” at 14.
“I don’t remember ever wanting to do anything else,” she says. “But I’ve seen some of my really close friends, who are brilliant people, in that total kind of float, of literally not knowing what they want. I could recognize that.”
Ms. Knightley’s first big movie role was in “Bend It Like Beckham” (2002), co-starring with Parminder Nagra as a teen soccer player.
“I always avoided the teenage roles, even when I was a teenager,” she says. “I think ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ was the only teenage role. I never really enjoyed being a teenager, so it wasn’t a place that I wanted to go back to.”
Next came her signature role as the proper but feisty Elizabeth Swann, foil to Johnny Depp, in 2003’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” (she did two sequels but says she’s done with those). Ms. Knightley was still a teenager and looked as if she were born to wear frilly dress, especially when playing against her delicately featured beauty with a childlike energy. After that, filmmakers couldn’t help dressing her up like a porcelain doll.
“Keira is drop-dead gorgeous, obviously,” says Ms. Shelton. “She’s been in roles that have kind of separated her, where she feels otherworldly, taking that beauty and putting it on a pedestal.”
The book club got hold of her and took her away. She was Elizabeth Bennet in director Joe Wright’s 2005 version of Jane Austen’s “Pride & Prejudice” and Cecilia in Mr. Wright’s 2007 adaptation of the Ian McEwan novel “Atonement.” She played an early-20th-century psychiatric patient, affecting a challenging Russian accent, in “A Dangerous Method,” David Cronenberg’s 2011 film about Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud (critics weren’t kind). She was a doomed Anna Karenina, without the Russian accent, in Mr. Wright’s stylized 2012 take on the Tolstoy classic.
“There was a definite dark chapter, characters with not-the-friendly-girl-next-door type vibe,” she says. “Characters who were highly neurotic and taut, and in certain ways repellent. They’re very different creatures, and I love them. But after ‘Anna Karenina,’ I thought I’d love to do something that has some optimism. It’s been nice to go lighter.”
Even playing the classics, Ms. Knightley injected playful smarts and her bright, toothy smile into roles. And she never exclusively did period drama, of course. She really was the girl next door to Steve Carell (technically, in an apartment downstairs) in the gentle apocalypse film “Seeking a Friend For the End of The World” (2012). Her return to 21st-century roles can’t be called a comeback exactly. Still, when she appeared in January as a CIA wife in “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit,” it was a bit of a “Hey, that’s Keira Knightley!” moment.
This year has been a busy one. Next month, Ms. Knightley will reunite with Benedict Cumberbatch (both were in “Atonement”) for “The Imitation Game,” a biopic about British mathematician Alan Turing. It’s a slight backtrack in time—to the 1940s—but she’s a trendsetting modern woman, the real-life cryptanalyst Joan Clarke.
Ms. Shelton says casting Ms. Knightley as Megan in “Laggies” was a natural.
“I went back to how she floored me in ‘Bend It Like Beckham’ and the first ‘Pirates’ movie,” the director says. “There was this physical ease and comfort in her own skin as a 16-, 17-year-old that just blew me away. I always remembered how game she was, and funny. I knew that was still inside of her. And it was appropriate that I was sort of casting her 17-year-old self, because that’s who Megan is still connected to. This lack of self-consciousness, dancing on the street and flopping on her parents’ couch. It was so lovely to see that side of her again.”
