Why Keira Knightley draws old men's faces all over her scripts: 'I get into a really meditative s...

The &34;Pride and Prejudice&34; star says her husband and friends give her photos to inspire her sketches, which she uses to help her learn lines. Why Keira Knightley draws old men's faces all over her scripts: 'I get into a really meditative state' The &34;Pride and Prejudice&34; star says her husband and friends give her photos to inspire her sketches, which she uses to help her learn lines. By Wesley Stenzel :maxbytes(150000):stripicc()/WesleyStenzelauthorphoto32b61793a2784639af623f2ae091477e.jpg) Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at . He began writing for EW in 2022.

The "Pride and Prejudice" star says her husband and friends give her photos to inspire her sketches, which she uses to help her learn lines.

Why Keira Knightley draws old men's faces all over her scripts: 'I get into a really meditative state'

The "Pride and Prejudice" star says her husband and friends give her photos to inspire her sketches, which she uses to help her learn lines.

By Wesley Stenzel

Wesley Stenzel is a news writer at **. He began writing for EW in 2022.

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November 22, 2025 11:32 a.m. ET

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Keira Knightley in London on Sept. 25, 2025. Credit:

Lia Toby/Variety via Getty

Keira Knightley can't stop drawing old men.

The *Pride and Prejudice* star explained her unusual habit in a new interview, revealing how sketching is part of her process for memorizing dialogue for movie and TV projects.

"I've always loved drawing," Knightley told *The Guardian*. "I draw when I learn my lines. They're normally old men's faces with very detailed lines. For some reason — I think it's because I'm dyslexic — so I have to get the words off the page as quickly as possible."

The *Atonement* actress said she reads the entire script aloud and studies the material as an audio file. "I record the whole script, then listen to it while doing these quite intricate drawings to get the lines into my head," she explained. "I get into a really meditative state, which I love. My scripts are full of pictures of old men's faces."

Keira Knightley in Paris on July 8, 2025.

Swan Gallet/WWD via Getty

Knightley added that her loved ones have noticed her sketching tendencies, and they sometimes provide her with material for her next portrait.

"Now that my husband and friends know I do it, they collect pictures of old men's faces to give me," she said, noting that she doesn't think she'd fare well with a live subject. "I don't think I'd like to go on Sky's Portrait Artist of the Year, because then I couldn't learn my lines. If I've got some dude sitting in the room, that wouldn't work at all."

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The *Pirates of the Caribbean* actress recently published a picture book for children, titled *I Love You Just the Same*, which she illustrated herself. The book came about as the result of a bedtime routine with her daughter.

"My oldest child does not particularly like sleeping," she recalled in an interview with *This Morning* last month. "I would say to her, 'Okay, what drawing would you like?' And she would say, 'Can you draw me a bird? Can you draw me a person? Can I be in it?' And then she'd go to sleep, and when she'd wake up, there'd be a drawing for her. And so she knew that when she was asleep, I'd been thinking about her because she would get really anxious in the middle of the night."

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After several months of this routine, Knightley had an overwhelming number of drawings.

"I had all of these images, and I thought, 'Oh, well I'll try and put them together for her,' and in the classic five-and-a-half-year-old way, she went, 'But they're not in color, and I don't want them if they're not in color,'" she recalled. "So I put them aside, and then a while later tried to color some of them in and I thought, 'Ooh, I wonder if there's a bit of a story out of it,' and it sort of came from there."**

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Source: Actors

Published: November 22, 2025 at 07:38PM on Source: MARIO MAG

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