Keira Knightley on Black Doves: ‘The violence is like a video game’

Keira Knightley is outraged. Why is Helen, her character in the deliciously enjoyable Netflix thriller Black Doves, accused of being a bad mother when Helen’s Tory-politician husband, Wallace, doesn’t even know his own child has asthma? “It’s all about his career,” says the 41-year-old in that unmistakable cut-glass accent. “She has to cope and it’s all about him, him, him. They’ve had to move to No 10, they’ve had to sell her house, they’ve had to move the kids’ school, and he’s completely busy doing something else. Then he says she doesn’t do anything.” She gasps. “Are you kidding?” One might feel more sympathy towards Helen were it not for the fact that she has a full-time nanny – oh, and that she is also an undercover agent whose marriage is a sham and who has shot a not-inconsiderable number of people in the head. “I mean, she’s a mass murderer,” concedes Knightley, “which is… yeah.” When it first aired in December 2024, Black Doves became an unlikely Christmas hit. It follows Helen Webb, a spy who embarks on a relationship with a politician in order to feed government secrets back to a shady organisation known as the Black Doves. Ambika Mod, left, plays Laila, reluctant sidekick to Helen (Photo: Matthew Towers/Netflix) Though it has all the hallmarks of a throwaway spy show – gloss, glamour, gleeful violence – there is heart, too, and a deep well of humanity within its characters, no matter how extortionate their kill count. How many other spy shows punctuate their shoot-outs with monologues about the perimenopause?Knightley is great fun to watch, too. The highest-grossing actress of the 2000s, she has a face and manner that has lent itself to period drama in the past – Atonement, Pride & Prejudice – but she brings a very modern sort of steeliness to this contemporary thriller, her performance elevated by the brilliance of her co-stars Ben Whishaw, as melancholy hitman Sam, and Sarah Lancashire, as Helen’s ice-cold handler, Elizabeth Reed. She enjoyed firing a gun, too. “The violence is almost like a video game,” says Knightley. “You’ve got a million different enormous guys, and bang, bang, bang, everyone’s dead. And then what [creator and writer] Joe Barton does is he brings one into proper focus, and it hits in a way that is appropriate for what’s actually going on. “That’s the joy of this show: you have the ridiculousness, and then you can have this piercing moment of absolute horror at the centre of it.” You could say it puts the pathos in psychopaths. “I think audiences are trained from a young age to watch characters [kill people],” says Barton. “If you step back, James Bond is essentially a serial killer. He’s killed hundreds of people, but you just go with it. From left, Mod, Knightley, Ella Lily Hyland as Williams, and Gabrielle Creevy as Eleanor (Photo: Netflix) “It is normalised in these genres that people go around shooting each other, when in most people’s lives, even the smallest act of violence would be this massive thing. But in these sorts of stories, it’s part of the fabric. As long as you make them interesting characters or you give them sympathies, audiences can do that juggling. We try to acknowledge the moral grey area.” Now comes the second season, in which that area gets even greyer. Tasked with even riskier missions in the wake of her husband’s promotion to 10 Downing Street, Helen discovers that Reed is missing and must try to track her down while dealing with the growing mistrust of her husband. Meanwhile, Sam, when he is not drinking himself into a sad stupor, must work his way through a kill list given to him by a mysterious man named Patrick (Sam Riley) in exchange for his freedom from prison. Arriving nearly two years after season one, this series was more challenging to write than Barton anticipated. “It was tricky,” he tells me. “We tried a lot of different plot ideas and threw a lot at the wall. I rewrote the first episode quite a few times. I mean, it’s always a struggle.” The finished result, though, is still just as compelling, once again treading that delicate balance between humour and darkness. Mod as Laila Joshi. The actress is best known for This is Going to Hurt and One Day (Photo: Netflix) And once again, you find yourself rooting for some fairly despicable people. “That’s what’s confusing,” says season-two newcomer Ambika Mod. “Because they’re mass murderers, but also, they’d have good chat, do you know what I mean?” Mod – best known for the Channel 4 drama This is Going to Hurt and Netflix’s One Day – plays Laila Joshi, a rogue Black Doves agent who becomes Helen’s reluctant sidekick. Friend, even? “I’m not sure friend is the right word,” says Knightley with a chuckle. “Interesting friendships, aren’t they? They kind of hate each other, then they’re really annoyed by each other, but they really need each other. The antagonism between them was really fun.” Mod is brilliant in the role, bringing a relaxed, cavalier energy, the perfect foil to Helen’s more uptight “spy wife” – though she is not usually a fan of spy shows. “It’s not like I’m against them,” she says. “They’re just not my kind of thing. When this came through, my agent was very quick to be like, ‘I know what you’re gonna say…’ But I watched the first season, and I loved it. Sarah Lancashire, in rear, plays Elizabeth Reed – Helen’s handler (Photo: Sanne Gault/Netflix) “It’s really different to the rest of the espionage genre: each character is a scene-stealer in their own way and I just loved Laila so much as soon as I read her.” We don’t see Laila’s back story this season (perhaps Barton is saving that for season three), but we do have more of Helen’s. In one flashback, we see her struggle to juggle her career (I use the term loosely) with raising twins – babies she may not have even wanted to begin with. “Oh no,” says Knightley, “I think she did want the kids. I’ve always thought she wanted the kids, because otherwise she wouldn’t have had them. “And this is where I think the relationship [with Wallace] is super-weird and super-interesting,” she adds, “because at any point she could have got out of it. She didn’t have to get married to him. She didn’t have to have kids with him. She gets herself deeper and deeper in, which I do think means there is love there. It’s just that she’s got the other side as well, which maybe she needs. But it’s actually quite a complicated mess.” Complicated messes have rarely been so fun to watch. ‘Black Doves’ season two is streaming on Netflix now