This Christmas, Keira and Hugh take us from Love Actually to mass murder, actually

Well, thanks, Keira and Hugh. You’ve really killed the Christmas spirit in my house – with a little help from Paddington Bear.

It’s been 21 years since the two of you combined in your only film together – along with Liam Neeson, Alan Rickman, Laura Linney, Bill Nighy and Emma Thompson – to conjure the most loved Christmas movie of the 21st century.

Hugh Grant in the movie Heretic and Keira Knightley in Black Doves.

Who can forget Hugh Grant dancing at Number 10 to the Pointer Sisters singing Jump (For My Love)? Or delivering what has been called the best speech ever delivered by a British prime minister to a bullying US president about “the special relationship”? (Pity it was fictional.)

As for Keira Knightley, she claims never to have rewatched the nauseating scene in which the best man at her wedding, played by Andrew Lincoln, declares his love for her in a series of cue cards (“To me, you are perfect”) but she knows millions of people watch the Richard Curtis movie each December.

Still, even if Love Actually has as many loathers as lovers, why did Keira and Hugh have to do this? Surely Christmas movies and TV offerings should follow a simple formula? Girl initially hates boy, comes to appreciate he’s not that bad, shares a few intimate jokes, nearly ends the blossoming relationship over a misunderstanding and ultimately realises he’s the one as Mariah Carey warbles a lush ballad?

Instead, Knightley and Grant’s screen offerings this holiday could be marketed as Mass Murder, Actually.

Knightley stars in a Netflix series, Black Doves, set in London before Christmas. She plays a traitorous assassin ordered by a mysterious spy organisation to marry a rising Tory politician (and delivers his twins). That’s deep cover!

In the first episode, the lover with whom she was planning to escape is shot in a political kill and she goes rogue, determined to wreak havoc.

She calls in a friend and hitman, played by Ben Whishaw, the award-winning Shakespearian actor best known to the younger generation as the voice of a certain marmalade-loving bear. (This apparently confused Knightley’s real-life kids who couldn’t understand why he didn’t resemble a stuffed toy when she told them her new co-star was Paddington.)

There’s certainly no resemblance between the parts Whishaw plays in Paddington in Peru and Black Doves, though both share deadpan humour. When the gay hitman rescues a brain-and-gore soaked Knightley from a kill gone wrong, his “hello, darling” greeting sets the scene for a series that is now one of Netflix’s top 10 most-watched shows in 89 countries.

Screenwriter Joe Barton has described Black Doves as both “a platonic love affair” and “a Christmas show”, always seeing it as a crime thriller choreographed against a backdrop of British festive rituals: decorating the tree, making the pudding and watching the school nativity play, while the body count grows.

It may have even pioneered a new “blood and baubles” genre since the only way anyone is going to experience a Silent Night is if silencers are used on the guns and rocket launchers.

As for Grant, he’s been branching out into character-acting since his romcom career nosedived. Bad-mouthing so many of his lead actresses didn’t help, even if most of his comments were meant in jest. He’s played villains before. Notably as the louche Daniel Cleaver in the Bridget Jones movies and Jeremy Thorpe, the disgraced British Liberal Party leader in the acclaimed BBC series A Very English Scandal, which co-starred Whishaw as his homosexual lover, Norman Scott.

Grant’s psychotic and conniving baddie, Phoenix Buchanan, in Paddington 2 even reintroduced audiences to his singing and dancing talents.

Hugh Grant and Keira Knightley attend the UK charity film premiere of Love Actually at The Odeon, Leicester Square, in London on November 16, 2003.Credit: Getty Images

But his role as Mr Reed in the movie Heretic takes him into horror, a place he’s never been before unless you count the critical response to the baleful Nine Months. Reed lives alone in a gothic house when he’s visited by two young Mormon missionaries played by Sophie Thatcher and Chloe East (both from Mormon families in real life).

As they do their best to persuade him to embrace their religion, he lures them ever deeper into a philosophical and theological discussion about atheism and the afterlife.

Without giving away the plot, Heretic has been generally applauded and Grant has been nominated for best actor in the Golden Globes, though the category – musical or comedy – makes victory unlikely. As unlikely as Mr Reed’s magnificently contrived monologue comparing Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Mormonism to variations of the board game Monopoly being cited from any Australian pulpit.

So both Knightley and Grant have gone against typecasting. Good on them. Just don’t complain if there’s mayhem under your mistletoe this year.

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