Keira Knightley Describes Feeling 'Constrained' After Pirates of the Caribbean : I Had to 'Break Out'

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Keira Knightley is opening up about a period where she "never felt comfortable" with how she was publicly perceived after rising to fame as a teenager in films like Bend it Like Beckham (2002) and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003).

In a new interview with Harper's Bazaar U.K. published Tuesday, Knightley, 37, called her maturation from adolescence into adulthood "an extreme landing because of the experience of fame at a very early age."

"There's a funny place where women are meant to sit, publicly, and I never felt comfortable with that. It was a big jolt," she told the outlet, recalling "being judged on what I was projecting" in her films, especially as her Pirates character Elizabeth Swann.

"She was the object of everybody's lust," Knightley said of the character, who went toe-to-toe with Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow and grew romantically entangled with Orlando Bloom's Will Turner throughout the blockbuster series. "Not that she doesn't have a lot of fight in her. But it was interesting coming from being really tomboyish to getting projected as quite the opposite."

"I felt very constrained. I felt very stuck," the actress added of how the part — and the fame associated with it — affected her. "So the roles afterwards were about trying to break out of that."

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Moviestore/Shutterstock Keira Knightley and Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)

Knightley recalled that she felt "felt like I was caged in a thing I didn't understand" as she rose to fame and described the years after Pirates first released as "a very tricky five-year window." That period of time included Love Actually (2003), an Oscar nomination in 2006 for her starring role in Pride & Prejudice (2005) and each of the three original Pirates movies.

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"I was incredibly hard on myself. I was never good enough. I was utterly single-minded. I was so ambitious. I was so driven," Knightley told Harper's Bazaar U.K. "I was always trying to get better and better and improve, which is an exhausting way to live your life. Exhausting."

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Now a Hollywood veteran who takes fewer roles, Knightley, who next stars in Hulu's upcoming drama Boston Strangler, identified "burnout" as a side effect of the intensity with which she approached her early career.

"I am in awe of my 22-year-old self, because I'd like a bit more of her back," she said. "And it's only by not being like that any longer that I realize how extraordinary it was. But it does have a cost."

Boston Strangler begins streaming on Hulu March 17.