Johnny Depp has weighed in on how he felt having to share an on-screen kiss with Keira Knightley, who was considerably younger than him in the Pirates of the Caribbean films.
Depp, 61, and Knightley, 39, starred together in three of the iconic Pirates of the Caribbean films in the early 2000s, portraying Captain Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann.
The first film in the franchise, The Curse of the Black Pearl, was released in 2003 and also featured Orlando Bloom, who played Will Turner, Swann’s love interest.
At the time of filming the franchise, Knightley was an up-and-coming actress at just 17 years old. Meanwhile, the Edward Scissorhands star was 39, and much more established in the Hollywood industry.
The Pride and Prejudice actress' character was involved in a complex love triangle between Captain Jack Sparrow, Elizabeth Swann, and Will Turner.
In Dead Man's Chest, which was released in 2006, Depp shared a kiss with Knightley.
Watch the scene below:Although the kiss wasn't supposed to be a romantic one - given that Swann was distracting Sparrow in order to chain him to the ship to get eaten - Depp still found it weird to shoot.
He opened up about it to The Standard in 2012, revealing: "Kissing someone you are not romantically involved with is always awkward, but the fact that Keira is twenty-something years younger than me made it infinitely more awkward. Still, she was a good sport about it and we did what we had to do."
He also spoke more about the kiss to TMZ: "Any kind of scene like that whenever you’re doing that sort of thing, it’s always unbelievably awkward especially having met Keira when she was 17 years old."
"But regardless of that it’s always awkward so you kind of just making light of it; she was a good sport and we just kind of did what we had to do, that’s the gig," he concluded.
Meanwhile, Knightley seemed to have a different point of view on her kissing partner.
"I couldn't ask for a better kissing scene with Johnny Depp actually I think my 14-year-old self was yelping with pleasure," she said in 2006. "It was fantastic! What more can a girl ask for? I've got Johnny Depp and Orlando Bloom and I get to kiss both of them. It's wonderful!"
As many years have gone by since the release of the franchise, Knightley has revealed that she views her experience on Pirates of the Caribbean in a different light.
The Bend it Like Beckham star said playing "an object of desire" like Swann at 17 left her feeling “stuck” and “constrained” in the film industry.
“[Elizabeth Swann] was the object of everybody’s lust,” she said. “Not that she doesn’t have a lot of fight in her. But it was interesting coming from being really tomboyish to getting projected as quite the opposite. I felt very constrained. I felt very stuck."
"So the roles afterward were about trying to break out of that…I didn’t have a sense of how to articulate it. It very much felt like I was caged in a thing I didn’t understand,” she added.