Keira Knightley on confidence, criticism and love: Life Lessons | Bazaar UK

Hello I'm Keira Knightley, I'm here with Harper's Bazaar UK and I'm gonna give you some life lessons. You do get more confident as you get older, I don't know why that is, I guess you've experienced more, you've gone through the highs and lows already, you just have kind of like a better sense of yourself. You also understand that you're never gonna please everybody and that that's an impossible thing to go with so I think you just kind of have the confidence to go this is me and you're not all gonna like it but that's fine. But it's really nice when you have a day when you're feeling really confident. Style's about doing what you want, style's about making yourself feel good and if you feel good then you'll look good. So when I was six I had two tracksuits and they were shell suits and one was like pink and white and the other one was black and purple and green and I loved them and that's all I'd wear and over the last year the same thing has happened and I've got two tracksuits and one is blue and one is green and I've just worn that so I think style has gone out the window but I've been like really comfortable. Best piece of beauty advice I've ever been given is take your makeup off at the end of the night although actually even that isn't completely true because although I think you should take your foundation off, quite often eye makeup looks better the next day. You just kind of tidy it up a bit under the bottom, it looks very cool and smoky. What's made me feel made up instantly is that I have red nails which again I haven't had for like the last year and I suddenly feel a bit, I feel a bit glamorous. The things that I think are beautiful are always the imperfect things, aren't they? It's always like somebody's imperfections which you end up completely falling in love with and finding absolutely beautiful so it's always different, I think it's different in person to what it is in pictures or on film or whatever. How do I stand up for what I believe in and how do I know my worth? I think again you get a sense of self, like you get a sense of what you're okay with and what you're not okay with. You're not worrying as much about pleasing absolutely everybody. You have the freedom to walk away and through the freedom to walk away I think you know what will make you stay and you know the sort of people that you want to work with and you know how you want to be treated and therefore how you're going to treat other people so I think that gives you a sort of sense of worth. I think success is a funny one. I think because you can be incredibly successful and not feel incredibly successful and I think success is different for everybody so I think you can't use other people as your benchmark. I think you have to find what feels right for you. I did always know that I wanted to work in acting, yes. I think you need to have a very thick skin so I think if you don't have one then you need to go about trying to get one quite quickly. Oh you never deal with unfair criticism. I mean it always hurts it doesn't matter how old you get. Really generally speaking the people who are unfairly criticizing you as opposed to fairly criticizing you which is different are normally the people that don't know you and therefore kind of what are they basing it on anyway. So I think it always kind of helps to sort of take a step back and go actually what are we talking about and as soon as you realize that it's all just puff and it's a bit silly then it kind of makes you feel better but it hurts at the time. You always go through the moment when it hurts before you can get the perspective on it to go like oh no I'm fine. What empowers me? I think a sense of autonomy. Freedom over choices and a sense of being my own self and making my own decisions and seeing other people do that as well. Feminism. Until we're all free none of us are free and until we all have equality none of us have equality. And so the fight continues. I hope that they continue the fight. I hope that they know their own worth. I hope that they expect that if they put as much work in as their male counterpart then they should be rewarded in the same way and that they should be treated with respect and treat others with respect. What have I learned about friendship? I think what's amazing is when you find people who you feel utterly relaxed with and actually I've found they're really few and far between and they're the ones that you want to hold on to. Love. What have I learned about love? I think what's been really interesting you know when you're kind of in your sort of late teens early twenties and you might fall in love with for the first time you equate love with just that romantic love and that romantic love is great and then as you sort of get older you find out that there are all sorts of different loves and that they change and that it's not something that stays the same and you might have kids and suddenly love is again a completely different thing and the love for your friends is a completely different thing and so I sort of love the fact that it's an evolving ever-changing thing I think that makes it even more special. Life advice from another woman it's got to be my mum which is cancel and continue which I think is the only advice that you really need in life at all because it's up and down it's always going to be up and down even when things go well you know your emotional state life in general it's sort of like the weather and when you've been through something bad you just need to go okay don't move forward so she's always said cancel and continue and I found that very helpful from being a kid to now.