Keira Knightley has played queens, whistleblowers and literary heroines. It took a spy who lies for a living to show her what had been missing from her life: a door to kick in.
"I didn't realize it was what was actually missing from my life, didn't realize how good I would be kicking a door in, and I was very good at it," Knightley said during a virtual press conference for the second season of "Black Doves," which premiered Nov. 5 on Netflix. "Maybe I should open some sort of a club where people got to just kick doors in, because it really was like the most cathartic."
Co-star Ben Whishaw, who returns as assassin Sam Young, wasn't surprised. "I feel like you went to a place in yourself with the violence this time," he said, drawing laughs. Knightley didn't argue. "As life goes on, you're just like, oh, I've got a lot of emotions to get out, and kicking the door in is really helping," she said.
The moment sits inside the season's big shootout, the rescue of Black Doves handler Reed, played by Sarah Lancashire. Whishaw said the sequence captures the show in one stretch: Helen and Sam escape "completely unscathed," and Knightley added they do it "with hair perfect and not a scratch." The pair also argue like old friends in the middle of the gunfire. Whishaw called it "deliciously silly but also, in a peculiar way, truthful," because some people can only have the real conversation once things reach "a certain level of intensity and madness."
A friendship that runs on debt
Created by Joe Barton, "Black Doves" follows Helen Webb, the wife of a rising British politician who has spent years selling her nation's secrets to the shadowy organization of the title. Season 2 raises the stakes. Her husband, Wallace, played by Andrew Buchan, is moving closer to becoming prime minister, and Reed disappears.
"She gets into this ultimate position of power, I guess, and then her handler disappears," Knightley said. "So, she's suddenly in a position of being at the most vulnerable, the most exposed, but also the pinnacle of her career."
The difference, she said, is how Helen lies. "Season one, she was lying mostly by omission, and season two, she's being called up in the moment to bold-face lie to people's faces," Knightley said. "You see she's like a worm on a hook quite a lot."
Asked whether Helen finally confronts who she is, Knightley laughed. "I don't think she does," she said. "As far as self-reflection, I'm not sure that she's there yet."
That leaves Sam to carry the guilt. Whishaw said the writing pushes the two friends into "quite horribly extreme" conflict while they stay loyal to each other, and Sam ends up "in pain and quite tormented and traumatized by what he's done." He has a capacity for reflection, Whishaw said, "that maybe Helen hasn't developed yet."
Knightley's verdict on the bond was blunter. "I think we discovered it's quite a toxic friendship," she said. "Maybe when Sam sees Helen's number, he should not pick up the phone. But Helen's very glad he does pick up the phone, because he does save her life an awful lot."
The two described a ledger neither can close. "There's an owing," Knightley said. "'I save your skin and you save my skin.' … But I think they're both at a point that the understanding is rather frayed. The consequences are getting higher and higher."
Should Sam survive?
Whishaw said he wrestled with Sam's fate during production. "I really want him to get out of this alive. I also thought it would be kind of interesting if he didn't," he said. Knightley confirmed it: "We all had conversations about that one."
In the end, Whishaw said, he wanted Sam to be happy, "a strange thing" to want for a character Knightley helpfully summed up as a "mass murderer." Halfway through filming, Whishaw said, he realized the season is a kind of love story between Sam and Helen. Knightley went further. They should have run away together, she said, then set her sights on "season three."
One take, no rehearsal
The action grew this season, but prep time shrank. Both actors credited their trainer, Rob, and said they had about a month of work before cameras rolled, less than on Season 1. One chase through an art gallery with co-star Ambika Mod, who joins the series as agent Laila, was shot as a single take after the pair had only rehearsed it in pieces.
"They'd suddenly like, 'Oh, we'd like to shoot this one shot,' and me and Ambika were like, right, but you've only just shown it to us," Knightley said. "I think we managed it, which was quite incredible."
Pitch-black and very British
The show's mix of murder and jokes is cultural, Knightley said. "British people are very good at making jokes out of incredibly serious things, and that's actually how we discuss very serious things," she said. "It is a very British show."
"Dark humor," Whishaw added. "Pitch-black humor," Knightley said. "That is the way they can express themselves and what they're feeling, and how close they are."
As for what's next, Knightley has an itch she hasn't scratched. She wants a sci-fi role, the melancholy kind that "really explores loneliness and kind of what it is to be a human." Whishaw said he'd like one, too. The moderator suggested combining the two. Existential sci-fi with plenty of door-kicking? "Exactly," Knightley said. "Perfect."
Season 2 of "Black Doves" is streaming now on Netflix.
