Keira Knightley has likened smooching Dominic West to "kissing a walrus".

Keira Knightley

Keira Knightley

The 33-year-old actress stars alongside Dominic in the new biographical drama 'Colette', which is based upon the life of the French novelist Colette, and Keira has admitted she hated having to kiss her co-star because of his "horrific facial hair".

She told 'The Graham Norton Show': "He had to wear a fat suit, which was problematic for him in 40-degree temperatures, so they created a cooling system inside so it looked like he had a colostomy bag on the side.

"Dominic is a very sexy man and he had to wear the suit, the bag and had horrific facial hair. I had been quite excited at the prospect of kissing such an attractive man at the beginning, I thought it would be quite nice, but it was sort of like kissing a walrus!"

Meanwhile, Keira recently acknowledged that her breakdown helped her to cope with motherhood.

The actress - who has a three-year-old daughter called Edie - believes that suffering a breakdown at the age of 22 helped her to deal with the challenge of parenting.

She explained: "Your body just created life and now it's shifting in order to feed it. That's monumental and we're all expected to go: 'Oh no, all good, I'm groovy - I haven't slept, I'm fine. That I'm able to forgive myself for not being brilliant [as a parent] every f**king day is probably because of that breakdown."

Keira also hit out at how women are portrayed in society, saying that they are forced to be "sexy" or a "virgin-mother".

She said: "Before motherhood, you're sexy, but if we talk about the whole vagina-splitting thing then that's terrifying; there's no sex there, so what we do is go into the virgin-mother retrofit, that's nice and safe.

"The problem with those two images is I think very few women actually identify with them. Women are meant to play the flirt or the mother in order to get their voice heard. I can't. It makes me feel sick."


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