There are many, many websites out there who will tell you that Keira Knightley limits her spending to $50K a year — we’re looking at you Daily Mail, Us and Business Insider among others [et tu, ABC News?] — but here at TIME, important stories like that get checked. And the actress says it ain’t so.
“It’s not true,” Knightley said during her interview for TIME’s 10 Questions about her new movie Begin Again, in which she plays a singer songwriter who lives on almost nothing at all. “I don’t know where that rumor comes from.” (It actually comes from something Glamour magazine reported earlier this year.)
Knightley dispenses with some other myths in the interview, including that Ian McShane was her drama teacher. (It was a different Ian McShane — not the scary gentleman from Deadwood and Sexy Beast and Kung Fu Panda.)
And if you always believed that Knightley comes across as a bit of an ice queen, well, that is actually true, and the actress knows it. It’s one of the methods she says she relies on to discourage unwanted male attention. Another is the thousand yard stare, so that nobody catches her eye. “I think I have quite a frightening exterior, so unless I’m soliciting, unless I’m up for it, I’m far too intimidating.”
Hear more about that, plus her favorite era in history, in the longer version of the interview, below.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misreported that Knightley had made a statement regarding her income to historian Amanda Foreman. Ms Foreman has never written anything about Knightley’s finances.
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