How Keira Knightley got into playing a spy for Netflix

(This story contains some spoilers from Black pigeons.)

Things rarely end well for spies in love in Hollywood films and television series. They inevitably betray or shoot their partners out of cold-hearted duty.

But that didn’t stop Joe Barton, the creator of Black pigeonsthe Netflix holiday spy thriller, streaming now, stars incriminating leading lady Keira Knightley as dedicated wife and professional spy Helen Webb with Ben Whishaw’s Sam Young, a fellow spy and assassin on all things love and relationships.

Barton tells The Hollywood Reporter that while writing the first season of Black pigeons (The series has already been renewed), he wanted to escape the glitz and pageantry of John Le Carré’s Cold War spy art and portray two “fallible people who happened to find themselves in this heightened world of espionage, murder and all that.”

Tune in to Peacock’s 10-episode thriller for the cape-and-dagger skull heist The Day of the Jackalin which Eddie Redmayne plays a professional assassin pursued by an intelligence officer; or Paramount+ with Showtime’s The agency, takes place in the world of international espionage through the London CIA station.

In Black pigeonsIn contrast, the capture of spies in love or out of love raises the dramatic stakes for Barton during an otherwise warm and fuzzy Christmas season, where the sudden death of Helen’s secret lover (Andrew Koji) sends her and Sam on a quest to find his murderer.

This need to avenge a murder, only to become caught up in a geopolitical conspiracy, certainly puts a strain on Helen’s marriage to her politician husband, rising government minister Wallace (Andrew Buchan). She has been sharing her husband’s secrets for years to a shady organization that Helen works for, making it difficult for her to explain where she was and what she was doing when she returned to her family after a hard day’s work.

Barton says he was inspired to write his surprisingly calming drama about the friendship and sacrifice between Helen and Sam by a letter to a newspaper advice column in which a woman whose husband had died discovered that he had been in one all along second marriage, and in reality her own relationship had been an affair. “She struggled with the fact that the man she loved had died, but she couldn’t tell anyone or share her grief. She felt she had to grieve privately, which is a fascinating and human emotional problem,” he said.

And after I wrote the first episode of Black pigeons Over Christmas, Barton presented the project to Knightley, the queen of historical and modern romance films Pride and Prejudice, Atonement And Actually love. A few weeks later, Barton and Knightley met in a London café to discuss the project. Now she is turning her attention to television, portraying an action and adventure heroine in shootouts, suspense sequences and political intrigue.

But Barton points to a theme in Knightley’s film career in which her screen characters have two sides: a public role and private desires, with the heart yearning for one thing and having to settle for another. “This is Elizabeth Bennett, Elizabeth Swan, her character in atonement. In (Knightley’s) works, she’s played women who society expects one thing from, but her heart goes in a different direction because of that kind of inner struggle,” he explains.

The result is Helen, a woman who plays a pretend wife but who is also a bit of a real wife, and who falls deeply in love with someone else who may not be real. And when Whishaw came on board, Barton witnessed on screen the emergence of a deep and platonic friendship between Helen and Sam as they question their pasts and life choices while uncovering a vast, interconnected conspiracy that links the shadowy London underworld with a looming global one Crisis connects.

“Ben was chosen because he just has a kind of mix of soulfulness and humor and we thought there could be really good chemistry between him and Keira, which fortunately there was,” Barton said.

Black pigeons Sarah Lancashire, Luther Ford, Tracey Ullman, Kathryn Hunter and Omari Douglas also star. 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).

Meanwhile, Netflix has already ordered a second season of the series ahead of its premiere, which Barton is busy working on as another Christmas approaches.

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Black pigeons is now streaming all six episodes of the first season on Netflix.