Keira Knightley on ‘Black Doves’ Spy Boot Camp & ‘Psychopath’ Characters (Exclusive)

Keira Knightley is going full action star in the spy vs. spy vengeance thriller series “Black Doves”! 

“Extra” spoke with Keira and her co-star Ben Whishaw about the series and their characters, who are unlikely partners.

Knightley plays a spy whose attempt to live a normal life is destroyed when her lover is killed, and she hooks up with Whishaw’s champagne-swilling assassin to solve the murder. 

To prep for the role, Keira had to do some spy boot camp, training in jiu-jitsu, boxing, and knife fighting for “about a month.” She added, “We were really lucky. We worked with an amazing stunt team and so the pieces, obviously, were very choreographed, but yeah, we did a lot of training to get our bodies to understand how exactly they would do that.”

Knightley and Whishaw kept score on who had more fight scenes. Keira ended up with more, which she jokingly thought was “a little unfair.”

Keira added, “I was like, ‘Why doesn’t he have to do that?’”

Ben quipped, “I like that I just swan in and shoot people.”

Knightley and Wishaw didn’t really have to rehearse with each other to build their characters’ chemistry. Ben explained, “We just got sort of thrown in, didn’t we? We just like each other. We’re just lucky.”

"I think we laughed a lot," Keira agreed.

She elaborated, “The heart of the whole series is this strange platonic friendship of these two very, very strange people. I think there was a deliciousness in showing that kind of a friendship in the midst of all the kind of murder and mayhem of this, the actual heart of it was how these two kind of were with each other."

Ben said of the characters, “I think they’re both people who are helplessly drawn to do things that they don’t particularly want to do, but they are addicted to it.”

"They're two poor little psychopaths who are having a bit of a life crisis," Keira offered. "And maybe they're questioning the choices they've made and maybe they weren't so smart... But it's too late, because you're in the center of it, and what are you gonna do?"

As for the series itself, Keira teased, “It definitely sits in the kind of ‘Die Hard’ ‘let’s explode everything at Christmas’ world, like, if you’re really angry with your entire family, then you can watch this. It can be quite cathartic.”