Keira Knightley

WHILE FILMING THE NOW-BELOVED 2003 rom-com Love Actually, Keira Knightley, then an up-and-coming British actress whose winning turn in Bend It Like Beckham helped make it a smash hit, told the director her next project was some pirate thingprobably a disaster.

Instead, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl went on to gross over $650 million. By 2008, after appearing in the next two installments, Knightley was a household name, and the second-highest-paid actress in Hollywood. But it wasn’t until recently that she began to ask about her pay in relation to that of her male costars. “It didn’t even occur to me,” says Knightley, who lives in London with her husband, musician James Righton, and their three year-old daughter. “It felt like something you couldn’t question. But I do ask now, and I can safely say that in my last two films, I have not made less than the men I’ve been working with.”

Since Pirates, Knightley has mostly appeared in independent films, many of them period dramas, and garnered two Academy Award nominations. There’s already Oscar talk for her starring role in the biopic Colette, about Paris’s famed Belle Epoque author whose ghostwriting for her husband led to him receiving all the credit. Colette was also an influencer, a century before the advent of social media, prompting many Parisian women to model themselves in her likeness. It is, in other words, a movie perfectly attuned to this moment.