Flash points where player meets part

KEIRA KNIGHTLEY

“Pride & Prejudice”

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IF the line between love and hate is indeed thin, Keira Knightley reveals that narrow margin neatly about halfway through “Pride & Prejudice.”

From the moment she meets Mr. Darcy (Matthew Macfadyen), Knightley’s Elizabeth Bennet is both smitten and repulsed. No matter how handsome she may find the moneyed gentleman, Elizabeth believes Darcy has destroyed her sister Jane’s love affair and double-crossed a mutual acquaintance, Mr. Wickham. What’s more, Darcy has dismissed Elizabeth as “barely tolerable.” And then Darcy has the nerve to ask for Elizabeth’s hand.

She spurns the proposal immediately, upbraids Darcy for his conduct, swears he’s the “last man in the world” she’d consider marrying, and then leans in ... for a kiss.

“Have you never fancied somebody that you didn’t like very much?” Knightley says in explaining her character’s wildly conflicting emotions. “I think you can despise somebody, but you can’t help but feel an attraction toward them -- which is where the entire relationship, from her point of view, starts.

“I think the whole point is there is a huge sexual chemistry between them. But she has decided very early on that she is going to hate him, and nothing can change her mind. Everything that she is told about him is going to make her hate him even more. And yet there is this attraction, this fire between them, because they argue so well.”

As written by Jane Austen and adapted by Deborah Moggach, “Pride & Prejudice” gives Elizabeth several showy scenes. She tells off the high and mighty Lady Catherine de Bourg, spurns the tiresome suitor Mr. Collins and looks after her troubled siblings. But it is Elizabeth’s rejection of Darcy’s overture, a confrontation that unfolds in a downpour and was filmed in a day, that Knightley singles out as her favorite sequence.

“She has always assumed that he hasn’t liked her,” Knightley says. “And suddenly, out of absolutely nowhere, comes a proposal. So you have shock, all of these different bits, and some great dialogue. That’s what you do it for, that’s the reason to act -- for scenes like that.”

But the would-be lip lock after so much bickering? Knightley says the idea was hatched not by “Pride” director Joe Wright but well before filming began, when she and Macfadyen met in an audition room.

“I did the scene with all of the guys who were up for Darcy, because I was cast before we found Mr. Darcy,” the actress says. “It wasn’t in the script at all. But as we were doing the scene, it just so happened that it felt right to do, right at the end. So we went through the scene, and we did it really, really quickly. We were literally in each other’s faces. And then we both went in for a kiss, and went out. There was complete silence in the room. And he was cast straight after that.”

No matter how successful the scene, the movie or the actress’ young career (the 20-year-old costars in this summer’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest”), Knightley remains her most unforgiving detractor.

“I watch it now, and I can pick it apart completely,” Knightley says of her “Pride” scene with Macfadyen. “The way I speak, the way I look, the way I move, anything.”

And yet, in her own understated way, Knightley remains proud of her accomplishment.

“You can’t ask for a better part than Elizabeth Bennet,” she says. “So if you give an actress who is even remotely good the chance to play a fantastic character like that, they are going to revel in it. They really are.”

-- John Horn