Keira Knightley has spoken out about the intimidation and harassment she experienced early in her career when she was “pursued by men” who blamed her for her aggressive interest.

Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Knightley said: “I knew as a young woman that it was absolutely shocking. There was a lot of gaslighting to say you wanted that from a lot of men. It was rape talk. They know, ‘This is what you deserve.’ There was a very violent, misogynistic atmosphere.”

Knightley rose to fame at the age of 17 with her role in Bend It Like Beckham before gaining international fame in the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise and Love Actually.

“It’s very brutal when you’re in your teens, in your early 20s, your privacy is taken away and then you’re subjected to that control while you’re still growing,” Knightley said.

“However, without this time I would not have the financial stability or the career that I have now. I had a five-year gap between the ages of 17 and 21 and will never have that kind of success again. It completely prepared me for life. Was that associated with costs? Yes, it has. It came at a high cost.”

The actress said that her “jaw dropped at the time” over how she was treated in public spaces, with the clear implication that “they specifically meant that I wanted to be stalked by men.” Whether that was stalking because someone was mentally ill, or because people made money from it – it felt the same to me. It was a brutal time to be in the public eye as a young woman.”

Knightley, who has two daughters, said she believes the internet has exacerbated the problem. “Social media has put this in a very different context when you look at the harm that has been done to young women and teenage girls,” she said. “At the end of the day, that’s what fame is all about: being publicly shamed. A lot of teenage girls don’t survive that.”

In an interview with The Times of London last month, Knightley said the popularity of the Pirates films had put her in a difficult position: financially stable but emotionally strained.

“It’s a funny thing when you have something that changes and destroys you at the same time,” Knightley said. “I was considered shit because of them, and yet because they did so well, I got the opportunity to make the films that ultimately got me Oscar nominations.

“Those were the most successful films I’ve ever been in and they were the reason I was publicly rejected. So they’re a very confusing place in my head.”

Six years ago, Knightley told The Hollywood Reporter that this revelation caused her to have a breakdown at the age of 22. She didn’t leave the house for three months and needed hypnotherapy to feel able to walk the red carpet at the Baftas for Atonement in 2008.

In 2018, Knightley wrote an essay called “The Weaker Sex” in which he addressed how explicit and internalized misogyny silences women. It ended with a broadside against male colleagues:

“Tell me what it means 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 her, flirt and mother her , flirt and mother. I don’t want to flirt with you because I don’t want to fuck you, and I don’t want to mother you because I’m not your mother… I just want to work, buddy. Is that ok? Speak and be heard, be spoken to and listen. Male ego. Stop getting in the way.”

Speaking to the Guardian in 2018, Knightley said that she wrote the article to try to “seize this moment and use our voices to keep the conversation going”, and hoped that the female experience in it The future will be more researched – and therefore better understood.

“Before motherhood,” she said, “you were sexy, but when we talk about the whole vagina split thing, it’s terrifying; There’s no sex there, so we go into the Virgin Mother retrofit, that’s nice and safe. The problem with these two images, in my opinion, is that very few women actually identify with them. Women are supposed to play the flirt or the mother to make their voice heard. I can’t. It makes me sick.”