‘Black Doves’ Creator on Casting Keira Knightley in Netflix Christmas Spy Thriller
[This story contains some spoilers from Black Doves.]
It rarely ends well for spies who are in love in Hollywood movies and TV series. Inevitably, they betray or shoot their partners out of cold-hearted duty.
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But that didn’t stop Joe Barton, creator of Black Doves, the Netflix Christmas spy thriller now streaming, from encumbering star Keira Knightley as dedicated wife and professional spook Helen Webb with Ben Whishaw’s Sam Young, a fellow spy and assassin, in all matters of love and relationships.
Barton tells The Hollywood Reporter that when writing the first season of Black Doves (the series has already been renewed), he wanted to get away from the glitz and ritz of John Le Carré’s Cold War spycraft to portray two “fallible human beings who just happened to be in this heightened world of espionage and murder and all that.”
For cloak and dagger skullduggery, tune in to Peacock’s 10-episode thriller The Day of the Jackal, which stars Eddie Redmayne as a professional assassin being chased by an intelligence officer; or Paramount+ With Showtime’s The Agency, set in the world of international espionage through the London CIA station.
In Black Doves, by contrast, capturing spies in or out of love during an otherwise warm and fuzzy Christmas season raises the dramatic stakes for Barton, where the sudden death of Helen’s secret lover (Andrew Koji) sends her and Sam on a mission to find his killer.
That need for avenging a murder, only to land themselves in a geopolitical conspiracy, certainly puts a strain on Helen’s marriage to her politician husband, ascending government minister Wallace (Andrew Buchan). For years, she’d been passing her husband’s secrets on to a shadowy organization Helen works for, which leaves her hard pressed to explain where she’s been and what she’s been up to when returning home to her family after a hard day’s work.
Barton says he was inspired to write his surprisingly reassuring drama about friendship and sacrifice between Helen and Sam by a letter to a newspaper advice column he read where a woman whose husband had died discovered he’d been in a second marriage all along, and in reality her own relationship had been an affair. “She was struggling with the fact that this man she loved had passed away, but she couldn’t tell anyone or share her grief. She felt she had to grieve in private, which is a fascinating and human emotional problem,” he recounted.
And after writing the first episode of Black Doves over Christmas, Barton had the project put out to Knightley, the queen of period and modern romance movies like Pride and Prejudice, Atonement and Love, Actually. A few short weeks later, Barton and Knightley met in a London coffee shop to discuss the project. Now, she is tackling TV, portraying an action and adventure hero in gunfights, suspense sequences and political intrigue.
But Barton points to a theme in Knightley’s movie career where her big screen characters have two sides to them: a public persona and private wants, with the heart yearning for one thing and having to settle for another. “That’s Elizabeth Bennett, Elizabeth Swan, her character in Atonement. In [Knightley’s] work, she’s played women who society expects one thing of, but her heart is pushing another way with that sort of internal grappling,” he explains.
The result with Helen is a woman playing a pretend wife, but who is also slightly a real wife, and she falls deeply in love with someone else who might not be real. And once Whishaw came on board, Barton had the making of a deep and platonic friendship on screen between Helen and Sam as they question their pasts and life choices while uncovering a vast, interconnected conspiracy linking the murky London underworld to a looming global crisis.
“Ben was chosen because he’s just got a sort of mix of soulfulness and humor and we thought there could be a really good chemistry between him and Keira, which luckily there was,” Barton recounted.
Black Doves also stars Sarah Lancashire, Luther Ford, Tracey Ullman, Kathryn Hunter and Omari Douglas. The Sister and Noisy Bear series is also executive produced by Barton, Jane Featherstone, Chris Fry and Knightley, with Harry Munday producing. The series is directed by Alex Gabassi (The Crown) and Lisa Gunning (The Power).
Netflix, meanwhile, already ordered a second season of the show ahead of its premiere, which Barton is busily working on as another Christmas approaches.
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Black Doves is now streaming all six episodes of season one on Netflix.
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