Keira Knightley On Motherhood: ‘It’s A Very Primal, Primal Love’

Keira Knightley has spent three months enjoying the bliss of being a new mother and now Keira is ready to come forward with her insights on becoming a mother, as well as the name of her newly born daughter. Ms. Knightley named her Edie.

“The love thing is astonishing,” Ms. Knightley says of the mother-daughter bond. “It’s a very primal, primal love. That’s quite extraordinary.”

Keira reveals that pregnancy and giving birth had a surprising effect on her own sense of worth and how she viewed her body.

“I have to say, as a woman, you hate certain parts of your body. You go through those periods where you look in the mirror and you think, ‘Oh, if only I had different legs or arms or whatever,'” Ms. Knightley said. “You go through pregnancy and labor and then feeding the kid and you go, ‘Wow, my body is totally amazing, and I’m never going to not like it again, because it did this, and this is f—ing extraordinary.'”

While Keira praises the benefits of pregnancy, Ms. Knightley found that not being able to celebrate birthdays, including her own thirtieth birthday, was a big drawback.

“I was heavily pregnant, I couldn’t drink — What is the point of having a thirtieth birthday if I couldn’t get phenomenally drunk? But my husband [James Righton] took over, arranged a lovely lunch at one of my favorite restaurants, 20 of us, and they were all being so sweet, like, ‘Look, you can have a great time and be sober!’ And it’s fine apart from the fact that they started drinking at about one.”

Ms. Knightly recounts the day with bemused aggravation, as she reveals that the party continued on, while she was forced to stand by and watch the others indulge themselves.

“Then they came back to our house — they’d covered it in balloons that said my name and happy birthday and all that — and they got completely obliterated,” revealed Knightley. “They were there until two or three in the morning, absolutely drunk, and I was there eight months pregnant, completely sober. So it was lovely, but it wasn’t what I’d imagined a thirtieth birthday was going to be.”

Ms. Knightley admitted to being relieved that she was finally leaving her twenties in the past, expressing feelings that most feel upon aging and moving beyond an age where the opinions of others heavily weigh on one’s decisions.

“My career was absolutely amazing; in fact, I don’t think my career will ever get better than it was in my late teens, early twenties,” Keira explains. “But as a person, you’re changing so much and you’re trying to figure stuff out. Some people go wild and have a great time and throw caution to the wind, and I was the complete opposite. I was very shy. It took me a lot of years to try and stop pleasing a lot of people and allow myself to have fun.”

Keira Knightley can be seen in Everest, when the Baltasar Kormákur directed thriller hits theaters on September 25.

[Featured image: Keira Knightly courtesy of Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images]