Maybe I should be grateful that Keira Knightley wasn’t all up on Michael Fassbender’s jock when they filmed their erotic spanking scenes in A Dangerous Method. Obviously, The Fassdong is a powerful thing, but Keira managed to walk away un-Fass’d. I wonder how she does it? Because after I see one of his films, I’m covered in total and utter Fass-lust for DAYS. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to be in the same room with him. Or God forbid, by put in a position where I was tied to a bed and he had to spank me. Oh, there it is. My new happy place.

Keira discussed A Dangerous Method, and her scenes with Fassbender in a new interview with The Hollywood Reporter. It’s a really in depth piece – you can read the full thing here – so I’ll include some of her comments on her career and some of older films.

On her early years as an actress: “It was always, sort of, my escape — and, sort of, a secret, because I wasn’t allowed to talk about it at school… 18, 19, 20, 21 is quite a tricky time, I think, in anybody’s life, whether you’re in the public eye or not, so the added thing of being followed around by groups of paparazzi, and being written about, and everything was very strange, particularly when you’re, kind of, going, ‘I don’t know who I am or what I want’.”

The Oscar nominations for Pride & Prejudice and Atonement: “It didn’t make me feel validated at all… I had very low self-confidence… I always believed the negative stuff and I never believed the positive stuff.”

Her next role: It was announced this week that her next project will reunite her with Joe Wright, her director on Pride & Prejudice and Atonement, for another ambitious literary adaptation: Anna Karenina, who has previously been played on the big screen by the likes of Greta Garbo (1935) and Vivien Leigh (1948). Knightley told me, “I mean, it’s a monumental book, and it’s a very hard task. So it’s gonna be great.”

On preparing for A Dangerous Method: “I’d never heard of Sabine before; obviously I’d heard of Freud and Jung, but I didn’t really know anything about them — I vaguely knew it was about sex and that parents get blamed an awful lot, but apart from that I didn’t really know anything. So as soon as I knew that I was gonna do it I phoned Christopher [Hampton, the screenwriter of both Atonement and Method] and said, ‘Just help, please!'”

The scenes in which her character is hysterical: “I sat in my bathroom for a couple of hours and pulled faces at myself… I wanted it to be distorting; I think it’s important that it was shocking… Actually, reading about it, doing research into it, we took it down quite a few notches than what I think it would have been, because a lot of the stuff that you read — you just think, ‘Nobody would believe it!’ It’s really extreme.”

Almost turning down the film because of the spanking scenes: “When I first read the script, I thought, ‘The script was fascinating, and it’s David, and I really want to work with David, but I read those two scenes and just went, ‘I don’t think that I can do that,’ particularly because it’s the age of the Internet; it’s gonna be everywhere; I don’t want that out there’… I phoned him up to really turn it down… I said to him, ‘Look, I love you, I love the script, I love the character, but I really don’t know that I can play those scenes’… He said, ‘Look, if I’m gonna do them, then they’re gonna be clinical; they’re not gonna be sexy, they’re not gonna be voyeuristic in that way.’ And I thought, ‘Okay, well I can understand that. As long as it’s clinical and it’s not some, sort of, weird sexy spanking thing.'”

Executing the spanking scenes: “There was a box which he hit, so he was nowhere near me, thank God! I did actually say to Michael before one of the scenes — I was like, ‘I’ve got a security guard outside. You touch me and he’s gonna break your legs!’ And he was like, ‘Keira, you’re tied to a bed. You’re not really in a position to say that.’ I said, ‘I guess you’re right.’… [I did] a couple of shots of vodka — definitely — beforehand, and then a couple of glasses of champagne as a celebration of never having to do that again!”

[From The Hollywood Reporter]

Jesus H. THAT is my new happy place, imagining Michael Fassbender saying, “You’re tied to a bed. You’re not really in a position to say that.” DEAR GOD. I don’t understand women like Keira. How can she do those scenes without rolling over and begging Michael to take her roughly against the period canopy bed in front of God, David Cronenberg and assorted Teamsters? Please, explain it to me, Keira. Does it involve holding hands and being extra “friendly” with Viggo Mortensen?

Photos courtesy of Fame, WENN.