Keira Knightley throws her hat into the “actresses who speak out about feminism” ring – but actually makes us really, really proud in the process. You can exhale in relief now.
In next week’s issue of Violet magazine, Knightley discusses her thoughts on being a woman in the film industry, and the challenges faced by women both in front of and behind the camera. “Where are the female stories?” asks Knightley. “Where are they? Where are the directors, where are the writers? It’s imbalanced, so given that we are half the cinema-going public, we are half the people [who] watch drama or watch anything else, where is that?”
Like Emma Watson, Knightley also advocates for the use of the word “feminist,” and laments those who think that it connotes something negative:
I don’t know what happened through the ’80s,’90s, and ’00s that took feminism off the table, that made it something that women weren’t supposed to identify with and were supposed to be ashamed of. Feminism is about the fight for equality between the sexes, with equal respect, equal pay, and equal opportunity. At the moment we are still a long way off that.
Taking pride in her choice to play empowered female characters in film, Knightley says that The Imitation Game’s Joan Clarke is of particular importance to her, facing many of the same problems women still face today. “I think it is interesting that for women in film the problems they face are generally put into the sphere of home and family and not into the workplace. Joan’s real struggles were to get her rightful ‘place at the table,’ and then once she was there, equal pay, which she never came close to.”
You can read the full interview in Violet magazine next week.
(via Indiewire)
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