Keira Knightley is offering rare insight into how she manages her acting career while living with dyslexia. During an appearance on The Graham Norton Show on Friday, Oct. 31, the Woman in Cabin 10 star, 40, revealed that she illustrated all the drawings in her new children’s book, I Love You Just the Same.
Knightley explained that she often draws while listening to recordings of her scripts, as the creative activity helps her memorize lines. “I draw a lot, anyway. I am dyslexic, so I find learning lines quite difficult,” she said.
“When I’m listening to them, I’m drawing the whole time,” she said. “I think they have to be quite detailed, otherwise the lines don’t go in my head. Normally, and I don’t know why, but I’m drawing pictures of old men with wrinkles.”
“Hello,” joked host Graham Norton, to which Knightley replied, “I’ll do one of you.” “Sounds like you’ve done it already,” Norton responded, 62.
“This was the first time that I’ve had to do something not old men with wrinkles and it had to be something other,” Knightley explained, referring to the drawings in her book. “I was doing it the whole time I was doing Black Doves season one,” she added.
Knightley previously recalled being diagnosed with dyslexia at age 6 during a conversation on Ruthie’s Table 4 podcast last year. She said her experience with dyslexia helped steer her toward acting. “The school said, ‘Look, she can’t read at all and we need a carrot to dangle in front of her.
Do you know if there’s something that she wants?’” she remembered her teachers asking her parents. “And they said, ‘Well, she wants an agent.’” Receiving an agent and acting opportunities motivated Knightley to improve her grades. “It did go up though! It was a carrot!” she joked.
The actress also spoke on the podcast about her daughter, who is dyslexic. Knightley shares daughters Delilah, 6, and Edie, 10, with her husband, James Righton. “We have a dyslexic kid,” she said. “Her memory is absolutely amazing.” Righton added that their daughter can “memorize the book basically, it’s amazing.”