Knightley: I wanted some fun films

Keira Knightley has revealed she wanted to pick more positive movies after Anna Karenina.

After playing the title role in Joe Wright's epic adaptation of Tolstoy's novel, the actress next stars in quirky indie musical movie Can A Song Save Your Life?, and the action film Jack Ryan.

She told Collider: "I'm excited to do every project I do. By the time I got to the end of Anna Karenina I realised that I'd pretty much died or somebody had died in every single one of the films that I'd done for the last five years and I sort of thought, 'I think I need to do something with a bit of positivity'.

"So the positivity came from Can A Song Save Your Life? with Mark Ruffalo which is about friendship, and making an album, and nobody dies, and then I thought, 'I think I'd quite like to do something that's just entertainment'- not just entertainment, but entertainment in that kind of Hollywood sort of run-around, explosions [vein].

"I've always loved thrillers - thrillers are incredibly difficult to do, which is why there are so few of them made now, and [the Jack Ryan films] have always been really good thrillers, so I sort of fancied that."

Keira said the prospect of working with Kenneth Branagh, who directs and stars in Jack Ryan, also led her to take on the project.

"I'm working with Kenneth Branagh who has been a hero of mine since I was about six or seven, so getting to be directed by him and act with him is something that I just thought, 'I want to do that'," she added.