Keira Knightley's New Venture: A Children’s Book
Keira Knightley, best known for her role in "Atonement," is now adding another title to her resume: author. She has recently published her first children’s book, titled “I Love You Just the Same.” The picture book is available now in the UK and will be released in the United States next summer by Gallery Kids/Simon & Schuster.
The story is both written and illustrated by Knightley, who is 40 years old. It tells a whimsical tale about a young girl who wishes her new baby sister would be carried away by birds. However, when this actually happens, the guilt-ridden girl embarks on a journey to retrieve her little sibling.
This project was born out of an accidental idea that came about five years ago, thanks to Knightley’s two daughters with her husband James Righton: Edie, who is 10, and Delilah, who is 6.
“It was a complete accident,” Knightley shared in a recent interview for her Netflix thriller “The Woman in Cabin 10” (now streaming). “My eldest kid didn’t sleep very much, and we tried many different nighttime routines to try and get her to sleep. Eventually, I came up with the idea that if I drew her a picture every night, then when she'd gone to bed, I'd leave it in her room.”
When Edie would wake up, she knew that her mom had been thinking about her. “So every night before bed, she'd tell me what picture she wanted me to draw,” Knightley continued. The pictures became more creative over time as Edie asked her mom to draw babies, cats, and birds.
“Then one day, when her sister was about 6 months old – she’d been crying a lot because she was teething – she said, ‘Can the bird take the baby away?’” Knightley said with a laugh. A story began to take shape, and she thought, “Maybe I can push this a bit further and make it more universal about sibling rivalry and separation anxiety.” So that's what she ended up doing, and she loved every bit of it. It was such a joyous thing to do.
Coincidentally, “I Love You Just the Same” was greenlit by the publisher the same day Knightley started production on Season 1 of her Netflix spy series “Black Doves.” The actress has a trick to memorizing lines, where she records her dialogue and then listens back.
“That's literally what I was doing the whole time making ‘Black Doves,’” Knightley said. “I would listen to my lines while I was drawing the illustrations for the book. It was kind of a weird juxtaposition: drawing a lovely pigeon at the same time as I’m learning lines where I'm about to kill somebody. (Laughs.) It was quite nice to have those two things going on at once.”
The two-time Oscar nominee jokes it took her “too long” to make the book, in that Edie has now grown out of it.
“I started it when she was 5, because we were doing it in a way where it was just between us and it wasn’t this whole thing,” Knightley said. “She’s so bored by it now. She’s like, ‘Has that book come out yet?’ And I’m like, what is the matter with you?!”
Delilah, meanwhile, has given her a thumbs up.
“She was a baby when we started and she’s 6 now,” Knightley said. “She’s like, ‘Well done, Mummy! I like your book!’ And I’m like, ‘Thank you!’ (Laughs.) That’s what I need.”
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