Keira Knightley has played everything from a lady pirate to a bounty hunter, but now she’s crossing genres in a new film that also stars Maroon 5 frontman Adam Levine.

Knightley will show off her singing chops in the film Begin Again, in which she stars as a songwriter whose collaborator boyfriend becomes a star and leaves her behind. Levine plays her boyfriend, although he wasn’t too sure he could be convincing as a film actor.

“I kept telling her she was great and she wouldn’t believe me, and she told me that I wasn’t bad at acting either but I didn’t believe her, so it was perfect,” Levine said.

Although Knightley says she didn’t have to have a perfect singing voice for the film because her character is more of a pen-to-paper creative type, she does have a talent for it, and showcased it in the 2008 film Edge Of Reason. Levine, on the other hand, was a natural.

“Adam is the classic frontman. He is a ball of energy. You just kind of switch him on and he just goes, and he just bounces off the wall for hours. It’s amazing being in a room with that much enthusiasm and that much energy,” she said.

Image via YouTube

Knightley says she got a little help from hubs James Righton when it came time to learn how to play the guitar convincingly onscreen, but that she wasn’t very good at it.

“He tried to teach me how to play the guitar and I tried not to kill him—so that was about it. And he stopped trying to teach me the guitar ‘cause I’m not very good at it,” she said.

Knightley and Righton have been married a year now, and the actress said in a recent interview that she hadn’t thought much about marriage before she met him.

“These words that you think beforehand, ‘That’s the reason I’ll never do it’… those words that you see as completely negative, and you suddenly see them as being incredibly positive, and that’s actually quite liberating and quite nice,” she said.

Begin Again opens on July 4.

Image via YouTube