“I would actually be the worst spy in the entire world,” Keira Knightley says. “If somebody tells me something juicy, I want to tell everybody within five seconds. You’d see it written all over my face.”
It’s a good thing than that the Oscar-nominated actress only plays one on TV. In the new series Black Doves (streaming now on Netflix), Knightley plays Helen Webb, a member of a group of undercover assassins whose double life involves being married to a rising-star British politician and moving in some of London’s most rarefied circles. When a civil servant with whom she’s close ends up dead, Helen has to figure out where her allegiances lie and who, if anyone, she can trust.
“I was looking for something that involved curious creatures doing strange things, and Helen’s definitely a curious creature and she’s definitely doing strange things,” Knightley tells T&C. “She’s a mercenary and a character with lots of contradictions. I enjoyed all of them.”
Keira Knightley plays an undercover assassin in the new series Black Dovesstreaming now on Netflix. Ludovic Robert/Netflix
Helen isn’t only interested in uncovering the truth. She’s also grappling with the return of her underworld mentor and friend Sam (Ben Whishaw), who’d gone missing after a job went sideways, and chafing against the constraints of her employment and the questionable loyalties of her mysterious boss, Reed (Sarah Lancashire).
“She made a decision to be an undercover spy, and she’s maybe regretting that decision now that she can’t get out,” Knightley says. “She is betraying the people that she’s supposed to love best every single moment of her life. It’s that contradiction of loving her husband, but also betraying him that I find really interesting, as well as this sort of strange friendship in which you can only be your whole self with another person who happens to be an assassin. The space that it sits in is just very juicy.”
Learning to portray someone who can keep a secret wasn’t Knightley’s only preparation for the series. “I did about a month of fight training beforehand,” she says. “When I read the first episode, I wasn’t supposed to do any fighting. Then bits for rewritten and I had a gun, which doesn’t require a lot of training. Then the director said, ‘I think you should be able to knife fight,” which sounded like a lot of work. I hadn’t done anything like that for almost 20 years, but it was fun going back and working with the stunt guys. I did a lot of jujitsu and boxing and pieced together her style of fighting, which I really enjoyed.”
Keira Knightley and Andrew Buchan in Black Doves. Stefania Rosini/Netflix
Was there any part of it at which Knightley most excelled? “I was quite good at all of it,” she says. “I slightly surprised myself.”
When I point out that claiming to be bad at keeping a secret might be exactly what a spy would tell people, Knightley assures me that no part of her role came home with her. “I vaguely came home to my kids and went, ‘Oh, I did a fight scene today, do you want to see it?’ And I’d be trying to show them how my scene went, but they’d be looking at me like, what’s the matter with you? I was put in my place very quickly.”
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