It has happened almost by stealth, and so incrementally that it might easily have passed without comment, but at last the truth can be revealed: Keira Knightley is out to monopolise Christmas. “Yes, I am planning to take it over,” she confirms primly.
Love Actually, in which her husband’s best friend declares his love for her (creepily, if we’re being honest) via cue cards as fairy lights twinkle around them, is the most overt part of the campaign so far. But don’t forget, too, her roles in the 2018 version of The Nutcracker and the apocalyptic 2021 comedy Silent Night. Now, the new six-part Netflix comedy thriller Black Doves finds her gunning – literally, this time – for the Christmas audience. Knightley plays Helen, a spy recruited years earlier by the M-style boss (Sarah Lancashire) of a shady international intelligence outfit. As the series begins, Helen’s cover as the wife of a prominent MP is about to be blown, endangering the lives of her oblivious husband and children. Enter her protector, Sam, played by Ben Whishaw, whose arrival heralds a family-size helping of Christmas carnage.
“I’m planning to completely ruin the festivities with this one,” says the 39-year-old Knightley, possibly thinking of the scene in which she greets Sam warmly while wearing an adversary’s blood and brains all over her face. “If you’re feeling angry with your relatives and you want to see two possible psychopaths killing lots of people at Christmastime, this is the show to go for.”
Whishaw, 44, joins her today in a London hotel suite, wearing thick-framed Yvan-style glasses and a scraggly beard, which he has grown for his role in the current West End revival of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. He is dressed in pistachio-coloured trousers and a green cardigan worn over a collarless grandad shirt, while Knightley sports an androgynous look (white shirt, black suit with fob watch, slicked-back hair) redolent of Joel Grey in Cabaret or Marlene Dietrich in Morocco.
Black Doves is tremendous fun, with special guests (Tracey Ullman, Paapa Essiedu, Kathryn Hunter, even Rat Scabies of the Damned) popping up like plums in a Christmas pudding, and Knightley and Whishaw making a fond, funny double act. Her two children, both under 10, were confused to learn that their mother was working with Paddington himself; Whishaw, after all, has provided the bear’s soothing voice in all three films, including the latest, Paddington in Peru. “They thought I meant the actual bear,” she says. “They didn’t get it at all.” A voice message from him as Paddington would make a priceless Christmas gift, I suggest. “Oh shit, yeah!” coos Knightley, eyes sparkling. The terminally shy Whishaw clutches his head at the thought, folding himself up like a deck chair.
Black Doves opens with Santa Claus elbowing his way through a crowded pub. Later in the series, we hear assassins discussing their favourite Christmas movies. Very meta. But is Black Doves the TV equivalent of East 17’s Stay Another Day, which was a Christmas No 1 purely because of its blasted bells? “You’re right,” nods Whishaw, momentarily distracted. “That song has nothing to do with Christmas.” Knightley points out that the seasonal setting of Black Doves does introduce a countdown element: “It all has to be wrapped up by Christmas so Helen can be with her children,” she says. Whishaw notes “the absurdity of being bombarded with jolly songs when you’re busy shooting everyone”.
Well, quite. Black Doves, black comedy: the violence is gory yet cartoonish. “He gets blown out of two bloody buildings in a week,” exclaims Knightley. “And he doesn’t have a scratch on him!”
Whishaw has done plenty of television work, scooping Baftas for The Hollow Crown: Richard II, A Very English Scandal and the acerbic medical comedy This Is Going to Hurt. For Knightley, it has been movies all the way – Pride & Prejudice, Atonement, the Pirates of the Caribbean series – with rare exceptions such as a 2002 Dr Zhivago miniseries. Not forgetting an appearance back in 1995 at the age of nine as a child arrested for theft in The Bill. “I was a tomboyish scruffbag at that age. Every other girl at the audition was having her hair brushed and wearing a party dress. And I was the one who got it.” She still sounds chuffed. “I was in year five and The Bill was the coolest fucking thing ever.”
“I don’t really watch television,” says Whishaw, drizzling on her parade. “What, nothing?” Knightley splutters. “Not really,” he shrugs. “And I don’t binge things. I wouldn’t find that remotely relaxing.” Having young children precludes Knightley’s own binge-viewing, though her husband, the ex-Klaxons musician James Righton, recently took the kids away, leaving her to a week of comfort viewing: The Perfect Couple, Nobody Wants This, Rivals. Her voice drops to a conspiratorial whisper: “And I fucking loved all of it.”
Neither actor watches their own work but they have been debating whether to make an exception for Black Doves. At the very least, it may give them a better idea of what was going on. “The first few episodes were written when we started,” says Knightley. “But not the rest. We didn’t entirely know where we were going.”
“That’s generous,” snorts Whishaw. “We had no clue!”
This, it seems, is the elastic approach of the show’s creator, Joe Barton, whose past hits include Giri/Haji and The Lazarus Project. “He writes to the areas and people that he finds interesting as he goes along,” says Knightley. What can be ascertained from the first two episodes is that Sam is returning reluctantly to London, which was the scene of a difficult breakup with his boyfriend. He is casually carnal: in only his second scene, he is shown having sex against the window of his hotel room with a pick-up from the bar downstairs. Refreshingly, though, no special fuss is made about his sexuality.
“I like that he’s just this queer guy who shoots people,” says Whishaw. The actor previously described the fleeting reference to the sexuality of his character, Q, in the most recent James Bond film, No Time to Die, as “unsatisfying” in an interview with the Guardian. “I don’t know that I do feel disappointed about that,” he says now. “I was just agreeing with the journalist because he was disappointed. I was saying: ‘It’s fair enough to feel that … ’ Someone else told me: ‘It’s a big deal that it’s in the film at all.’”
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Whishaw has been drawn to espionage repeatedly in his career, and has confessed to a general fascination with spies. I mention that it is common knowledge that his own German-Russian grandfather spied for the British during the second world war. At this, Knightley nearly leaps out of her seat. “I didn’t know that!” she squawks, jaw hitting the floor. “Well, we don’t know much about what he did,” he replies calmly. “But I can see why he made a good spy. He was taciturn. He sat there smoking in his armchair. And he had a skull ashtray.” Whishaw mimes his grandfather flicking the ash into the skull. “He was frightening. He thought we looked like thugs, my brother and I, because we had short hair.
“He was someone to be cautious around. I think he was disappointed. The war had wrecked everyone’s lives, and whatever ambitions they might have had. I think he wanted to be a writer. A poet. Instead, he ended up fixing radios in Britain, and selling them at a market. It’s not what he thought life would be.” He pauses. “Bless him. I don’t mean to speak ill of him.” At that, Knightley and I offer identical responses in stereo: “He sounds fascinating!”
Perhaps Whishaw has followed in his grandfather’s footsteps after all. Are the skillsets required by actors and spies so very different? “I think all actors are always acting, all the time,” he says. “Which is really annoying. But it applies to everyone. You have to be an actor to live.”
Knightley warms to the idea. “You hide all the time,” she says. “You have an argument with your partner, you go into work, you go ‘Hiii!’ even though you’re feeling like shit. That’s what acting is.”
Helen in Black Doves is described as “a coiled spring” and “an intelligent risk-taker”, which sums up many actors. “Yes,” Knightley agrees. “I think there’s an inherent rage to actors. I see that quite a lot. Masked brilliantly but easy to access. Not that people behave badly, because generally they don’t. But there’s a well of anger that opens very quickly. It comes from this being such a subjective industry where it is very public when things go wrong. And it’s an industry of people searching for a truth that by its very nature they can’t find because it’s fiction. Maybe that creates the coiled spring, which is where some performances come from.”
Whishaw leans forward, looking rapt. Does the description ring true to him? “Yeah,” he says, then turns to Knightley: “I’m fascinated by how you articulated that.”
She smiles back. “They’re interesting creatures, actors. Funny creatures, I think.” Does she have that well of anger in herself? “Sure! It’s what I use. You use what’s in you. You bring it out of yourself and then you just kind of … ” She makes a noise that is part splurge, part vomit, part conjuror’s “ta-da!” I ask how on earth I’m supposed to spell that on the page, and her eyes glint wickedly. “Good luck – and you’re welcome.”
Black Doves is on Netflix from 5 December.