'It's the male gaze': Keira Knightley is done filming nude scenes for male directors

Keira Knightley has revealed that she no longer feels comfortable filming nudity and sex scenes with male directors and, as her career continues, is much more interested in telling stories with female filmmakers.

"I don't have an absolute ban [on filming nude scenes], but I kind of do with men," she said on a recent episode of the Chanel Connects podcast, with The Farewell director Lulu Wang and journalist Diana Solway. "It's partly vanity and also it's the male gaze."

The Oscar-nominated actress has worked with numerous male directors throughout her career, having shot one of film's most iconic love scenes – in Atonement and that infamous green dress – with long-time collaborator Joe Wright. 

She explained that she's well aware directors often need "somebody to look hot," but that she's particularly not a fan of "those horrible sex scenes where you're all greased up and everybody is grunting. I'm not interested in doing that."

"Saying that, there's times where I go, 'Yeah, I completely see where this sex would be really good in this film and you basically just need somebody to look hot,' so therefore you can use somebody else," she added. "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."

After giving birth to her first daughter Edie in 2015, Knightley added a no nudity clause to all of her movie contracts.

Moving forward, the 35-year-old added that, when it comes to telling stories based on the female experience, she'd prefer to work with a female director.

"If I was making a story that was about that journey of motherhood and body [acceptance], I feel like, I'm sorry, but that would have to be with a female filmmaker," Knightley said. "If it was about motherhood, about how extraordinary that body is, about how suddenly you're looking at this body that you've got 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. But I feel very uncomfortable now trying to portray the male gaze."

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This isn't the first time the actress has addressed the position she feels she's fallen into since becoming a mother, and the limited ways in which women are often seen through the male lens. 

In a 2018 interview with The Guardian, which is worth a read, she said, “Before motherhood, you’re sexy, but if we talk about the whole vagina-splitting thing then that’s terrifying; there’s no sex there, so what we do is go into the virgin-mother retrofit, that’s nice and safe. The problem with those two images is I think very few women actually identify with them. Women are meant to play the flirt or the mother in order to get their voice heard. I can’t. It makes me feel sick.”

Recalling a previous instance where an unnamed male director dubbed her "aggressive" for once sharing a dissenting opinion, Knightley added, “We all empathize with men hugely because, culturally, their experience is so explored. We know so many aspects of even male sexuality. But we don’t feel like men can say, ‘Yes, I understand what you’re talking about because I’ve got this wealth of art and film and theatre and TV from your point of view.’”

In a hard-hitting essay that same year titled "The Weaker Sex" and published in a collection called Feminists Don’t Wear Pink And Other Lies, Knightley wrote, “They tell me what it is to be a woman. Be nice, be supportive, be pretty but not too pretty, be thin but not too thin, be sexy but not too sexy, be successful but not too successful. … But I don’t want to flirt and mother them, flirt and mother, flirt and mother. I don’t want to flirt with you because I don’t want to f--k you, and I don’t want to mother you because I am not your mother. … I just want to work, mate. Is that okay? Talk and be heard, be talked to and listen. Male ego. Stop getting in the way.”

It's a very telling experience, and not one unique to Hollywood. For Knightley, it's shifted the course of her career before, too, and for the better. After experiencing a breakdown at the age of 22 after considerable exposure at the start of her career, and suing the Daily Mail for implying she was anorexic around the same time, she began gravitating toward smaller films, many of them notoriously period due to their stronger female roles. 

Now that Knightley has turned another corner, it seems her characters are only about to get more powerful and, let's hope, angrier.

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