Over the years, Keira Knightley has graced our screens as prickly, complicated period piece women, posh love interests, and larger-than-life franchise icons. But in Netflix’s Black Doves trailer, we get a new flavor of Knightley: take-no-prisoners, super-spy action hero. It’s a great look for her, and not a bad one for Ben Whishaw either: having spent more than a decade as tech support for the world’s most famous spy, he now gets to do the spying himself. Both of them are in badass mode for this new series, which premieres on the streamer on December 6.
The show follows Knightley as Helen Webb, a seemingly ordinary mother who has secretly been feeding her politician husband’s secrets to the espionage organization the Black Doves for the last decade. Following the assassination of Helen’s lover Jason (Andrew Koji), spymaster Reed (Sarah Lancashire) calls in Helen’s old friend Sam (Whishaw) to protect Helen as she investigates who killed Jason and why. Their pasts and their secrets threaten to derail their mission as they “uncover a vast, interconnected conspiracy,” per the Netflix synopsis. “One that links the murky underworld of London to a looming geopolitical crisis—and leads them to question the cost of the moral choices they’ve made.”
With deference to Pirate Queen Elizabeth Swan, Helen Webb may be even more brutal and deadly. The Black Doves trailer begins with the news that Helen “might have compromised” herself in light of Jason’s death, and now she’s a target. Luckily, she’s pretty good at taking care of herself, but she does have big concerns about protecting her family. There’s a lot of boilerplate spy thriller stuff in here, but also some surprisingly funny moments, as when Knightley is kamikaze yelling at one of her attackers only to become drenched in their blood when Whishaw comes in with the last-minute save. “Hello darling,” he says, admitting that a shotgun was “all I had on me.”
Black Doves has already been renewed for a second season at Netflix ahead of the first season premiere. The show was created by Joe Barton (Giri/Haji, The Lazarus Project), and also stars Luther Ford (The Crown), Adeel Akhtar (Fool Me Once), Tracey Ullman (The Tracey Ullman Show), Finn Bennett (True Detective: Night Country), Andrew Buchan (Carnival Row), Koji (Warrior), Kathryn Hunter (Andor), Sam Troughton (Mank), Ella Lily Hyland (Fifteen-Love), Adam Silver (The Diplomat), Ken Nwosu (Look The Other Way And Run), Gabrielle Creevy (In My Skin), and Omari Douglas (Rye Lane).