Keira Knightley: 'Black Doves is a Christmas series – like Love Actually, but we kill everyone!'

The actor has seen the classic romantic comedy – written and directed by Richard Curtis – in which she starred as an 18-year-old, only once, at its premiere in 2003 – "and I’ve never seen it since". Perhaps she’s missing out? "I’m not in it that much… Maybe I could just fast forward through that bit."

It was Love Actually that, around the same time as it was released, influenced Joe Barton when he was a young student, doing a film course at the University of Westminster with aspirations of being a director. “I was aware that Richard Curtis had been a screenwriter and now he was directing something,” Barton recalls, “and I was, like, ‘Oh well, if that guy’s done it maybe I could, too.’ ”

Barton tells me that he started writing stories as a child and made little films from a young age, and says that he’s happy to have stuck with writing rather than try his hand at directing. His best-known television shows are Sky’s time-travel science-fiction The Lazarus Project and the BBC’s Japanese crime co-production Giri/Haji, with its mesmerising rooftop dance-fight finale.

We’re talking yuletide films because Barton has written a new spy thriller series, Black Doves, starring Knightley in the lead, set in London and opening in a pub with the familiar, slurring warble of Fairytale of New York.

“Yes, it’s a Christmas series,” Knightley exclaims, brightly. “So maybe this is the new Love Actually… but we kill everyone!”

“Death Actually,” deadpans Barton. This is typical of the tone of jolly banter in this Zoom interview – Barton in what looks like a study, whose backdrop is a moody, dark green wall, covered in art; Knightley in a pale, rather elegant-looking room, with one of her young daughters clamouring to come in.

Black Doves is the name of the spy organisation Knightley’s character Helen works for. Helen’s cover, which she has maintained for ten years, is as the doting wife of high-ranking politician Wallace, played by Andrew Buchan, who is heading for the top job of prime minister.

All the while she has been feeding government secrets to Reed, the Black Doves boss, played by Sarah Lancashire. The six-part series starts with the assassination of Helen’s lover Jason (Andrew Koji), leaving her breathless with grief but having to mask it while continuing to juggle her many roles and avoid being bumped off herself.

Meanwhile, an old friend and colleague, Sam (Ben Whishaw), is recalled to duty from Rome – where he has been sauntering down the Spanish Steps and sipping champagne in cosy bars in his attempt at living la dolce vita – to protect Helen.

There’s a tremendously tense, black-comedy moment, when Helen is hiding behind a door, as two female assassins thump up the stairs brandishing guns, and her small daughter flashes up on her mobile phone, asking: “Mummy, where are you?”

The actor married musician James Righton, of the possibly permanently paused band the Klaxons, in 2013 in the south of France; they live in north London with their daughters Edie, nine, and Delilah, five.

Has Knightley’s experience of being a working mother – while not encountering quite such sinister clashes, presumably – informed her understanding of how to colour Helen?

“Yes,” she says. “One of the things I liked about Helen is taking that thing you experience a lot, particularly as a mother or a father – you’re in the car doing the school drop off, you’re screaming at your children, you’re so angry, you’re all screaming at each other and you get out of the car, and there’s all the mums at the school gate and it’s instantly, ‘Oh, hi!’ [perky voice; mega-watt grin]. And in life it’s those double faces that you have.

“Then suddenly you’re at work and you’ve got your work face on and then you’ve got your kid on the phone and you’re, ‘Oh baby, are you OK?’ So it’s that thing I think we all know and that we all do, but ramped up to ten, or 11 or 12. And that’s what I liked. It made me giggle. Particularly that scene you’re talking about.

“We all do it. For me, I’m on a film set and then it’s, ‘Oh, you passed your spelling test – I love you so much!’ Whereas this is, ‘Darling, I love you so much and they’re just about to kill me. Kiss darling, goodbye.’”

Knightley is pleased to share that there were many discussions about “The Juggle” on the shoot, because several people from the production had small children at home, including Barton, who lives in Brighton with his partner, Alice, and their two boys, aged 13 and seven.

He wrote the first episode of Black Doves (he appropriated the name from his local pub) in the quiet week after Christmas in 2022. “I wrote it on a whim, to be honest,” he recalls. “I started it on Boxing Day and finished it on New Year’s Day – it irritated the people I live with!”

It’s got all the things he likes in it: “Spies, Christmas and London.” There were two sparks for the idea – one, he was in a “spy kind of mood”, as he puts it, after a friend of his had worked on A Spy among Friends, based on the book by Ben Macintyre about double agent Kim Philby. And then, he read an article in a newspaper, where a woman was talking about the man with whom she’d been having a clandestine affair, who had died – “there was something about the idea of being in a secret relationship when one of you is gone and you can’t talk to people about it, which was really interesting to me.”

It’s Knightley’s first television series – “or is it called long-form streaming [on Netflix]?” she asks – since she played Lara in the 2002 ITV mini-series of Doctor Zhivago. She’d been looking for the right project for a while, but nothing had come to fruition. Fortuitously finessed by their mutual manager in America, the actor said she was interested in seeing Barton’s new script, having loved his Giri/Haji. She fell for Black Doves as soon as she read it.

Then Sister Productions, the company co-founded by Elisabeth Murdoch, Stacey Snider and Jane Featherstone and known for taking creative risks (Eric, Kaos), wanted in and, just like that, Knightley was on board. Barton can still tap into the swooning vertigo of receiving an email from his manager very early on in the proceedings, where the subject line was simply: “Keira Knightley”.

Once he knew she was committed, they met up and developed the rest of the series. It’s pretty common now for major actors to have an executive producer credit. How meaningful was that title in her case? “Because you’re coming on so early, it’s a leap of faith to go, ‘I’m signing up for six episodes, and I’m willing to commit to it financially and all the rest of it,’ when I’ve only seen one,” she explains.

“It’s a different thing to a film where you go, ‘I know exactly what this is and everyone is in place.’ This, in contrast, is, ‘OK, where are we taking this? What’s going to happen? How is this going to work?’ And as an executive it gives you a little bit more power to have approval over a lot of stuff.”

We talk about the dream-like finale of Giri/Haji, which the actor is not alone in adoring: “Oh, my God, how he finishes it all with an interpretive dance! It’s amazing. Joe, can we finish season two [of Black Doves] with – well, just give me a dance routine!”

Barton: “Yes, the whole of the second series will be one long…”

“Tango!” interrupts Knightley.

“It will be Strictly Come Spies,” smiles Barton.

It was only a month before our interview that Barton was told that Netflix would be renewing Black Doves for a second season, which came as a shock: “It’s never happened before. Most things I work on get cancelled almost instantly.

“So, I was all prepared to have a really nervous Christmas this year. I was on holiday, and in an Italian supermarket, when I got a call from the producers saying, ‘Come home, you need to start writing, we’re doing more.’ ”

He says it’s wonderful to have “everyone feeling very, very confident about the show and that we’ve made something that we can all stand behind and can’t wait for people to watch.”

Barton’s The Lazarus Project was cancelled after two seasons; Giri/Haji after only one. Then there was the firing from HBO Max’s television spin-off from The Batman. I ask Barton how he found Hollywood and he laughs grimly: “A marvellous place to be!” Before adding, “I’ve got mixed experiences because every time I’ve worked in Hollywood I’ve ended up being fired, so…”

Knightley: “Happens to most people.”

Barton: “Yes, par for the course.”

What about you, Keira? “I haven’t been for an awfully long time. I’ve had some good experiences and some not-so-good – like anywhere.”

He doesn’t want to push his luck by even thinking about a third season, “although that would be lovely”. They both loved Kaos, a mythological black comedy series, starring Jeff Goldblum as Zeus (Keira binged it), only for it to be cancelled by Netflix, to much fan outcry.

Her favourite TV series include The West Wing and Grey’s Anatomy: “I didn’t do it all, but I did a lot of seasons when breastfeeding in the night – that was for both the children. I don’t know why, but it’s a great middle-of-the-night, breastfeeding watch and for that, it holds a special place in my heart.”

There’s some droll and distinctly saucy repartee in Black Doves – it’s slightly James Bond-like in innuendo (although filthier), as well as dryness. Are they fans of the franchise?

“I am – I like Q,” says Barton. Well, it is Ben Whishaw, after all.

“I’ve liked some of them,” Knightley says. “They’re fun. Good to watch at Christmas.”

So in the spirit of the countdown to Christmas, how do they celebrate? Barton: “I have lots of Christmas traditions, even down to where the individual decorations are in the house. It’s basically ‘A Thing’. Lots of food and drink – pretty standard. My partner is vegetarian, as is her whole family, but I’m not. I cook Christmas dinner and buy a little chicken for myself and one of my sons and then make a big nut roast for the 15 other vegetarians that come round.”

Charades? “No, there’s too many of us, it’s too loud and the children won’t sit still for it. I hope to be able to do that one day, but for now the decibel level would be too much.”

Knightley: “Lots of food, lots of wine, no charades – although I might bring that in, could be a good thing. Lots of Christmas movies.”

It’s always The Godfather Parts 1 and 2, apparently – but perhaps this year it will also be Love Actually.

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Black Doves is available to stream on Netflix from 5th December. Sign up for Netflix from £4.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.

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