Keira Knightley speaks openly about the negative side of fame, especially in her early 20s when she recalled being “stalked by men.”

The Oscar-nominated actress looked back on her early days as an actress in a recent interview with the Los Angeles Timesincluding the harsh scrutiny and body shaming she faced for being in the public eye at such a young age.

“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 rose to fame in 2003 when she was just 18 years old for her roles in The Movie Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl And Actually love. However, it was her performance as Elizabeth Swann in pirates of the Caribbean Franchise that elicited the most undesirable and inappropriate behavior from others.

Knightley said her “jaw dropped at the time” at how people treated her in public spaces. “I didn’t think it was OK at the time,” she explained. “I realized 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.”

The pride and Prejudice The actress continued: “They specifically said that I wanted to be stalked by men. Whether it was stalking because someone was mentally ill or because people were making money from it, it felt the same to me. It was a brutal time to be in the public eye as a young woman.”

Now, more than two decades later, she believes social media has made things worse for young girls today. “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,” Knightley added. “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.”

Last month, the atonement Star reflected on her time doing this Pirates Films in which she starred alongside Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom. While she credits the franchise with helping establish her name in Hollywood, she also cites the films’ popularity as “the reason I was publicly kicked out.”

“It’s a funny thing when you have something that changes and destroys you at the same time,” Knightley said of the franchise at the time. “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. They were the most successful films I’ve ever appeared in and were the reason I was publicly rejected. So they’re a very confusing place in my head.”