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PORTSIDE CULTURE

IS BEING A GUARDIAN REPORTER AS EXCITING AS THE MOVIES MAKE OUT?  
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Zoe Williams
October 10, 2025
The Guardian
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_ Keira Knightley cuts a more glamorous figure than most Guardian
staff in her new Netflix film The Woman in Cabin 10, while Tennant is
a dead ringer for star reporter Nick Davies. But how convincing are
they? _

‘Journalists on screen are always idealised’ … Keira Knightley
in The Woman in Cabin 10. , Photograph: Parisa Taghizadeh/PA

 

In The Woman in Cabin 10, Netflix’s new potboiler, Keira Knightley
plays a fearless justice warrior, a lone voice of dogged truth in a
maelstrom of corruption, and this is not her first foray into such
terrain: six years ago she played the whistleblower Katharine Gun
in Official Secrets
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the 2019 film about some pretty dicey US and UK behaviour before the
Iraq war.

This time round she’s a journalist
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though – and not just any old hack, a Guardian journalist. Exhausted
and possibly traumatised by a crusading investigation she has just
finished about some bad people doing bad things, she accepts a trip on
a billionaire’s yacht for a breather, only to discover that
billionaires are also bad
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You cannot call that a spoiler, even though it technically is one.
You’re reading the Guardian, for Pete’s sake.

Close in mannerism … Toby Jones as former Guardian editor Alan
Rusbridger in The Hack. Photograph: Shutterstock

Journalists on screen are always idealised, whatever paper they’re
from – film amps up the tenacity, intelligence, commitment and,
often, cardiovascular fitness of hacks, which is fair enough: that’s
its business, to filter out frailty. The only rose-tint that bugs me
with print journalism, and this has been bugging me since Almost
Famous came out a quarter of a century ago, is that all the drama
happens in a situation where interesting things are going down and the
key players actively want to include a journalist. It just isn’t
true to life. Any time a billionaire, or a rock quartet, or some
generals, or a prime minister, actively want to talk to you, it’s to
tell you something boring, to keep you busy. But this is a pet peeve;
back to Knightley, on her yacht, being told real things, when a murder
happens.

Box sets and films dealing specifically with the Guardian – Snowden
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about the CIA whistleblower and the paper; The Hack
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about Nick Davies’s hacking investigation; its role in The Bourne
Ultimatum
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idealise in bespoke ways. They always make the office look incredibly
lively, people constantly leaping up and pointing at each other in a
universally understood semaphore of hard news, whereas in real life
people are disappointingly quiet and sedentary, often, en masse,
remaining so still that the movement-triggered lights go off.
Knightley in this film is exquisitely tailored. The stories always get
into print incredibly fast, with nobody ever saying: “We won’t be
able to say this until it’s been proven in a court of law, which
will take roughly 18 months.”

Why they used the Guardian in The Hack and Snowden is self-evident,
it’s because those things happened here; in The Hack, the
performances are so close in mannerism and bearing that you just have
to hand it to them, they obviously were trying to work with what they
had. David Tennant is spookily like Nick Davies
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physically resemble former editor Alan Rusbridger
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shapeshifts. All other considerations (please stop saying
“redacted”, it’s very distancing; is it too much to ask that the
bad guys go down for something?) melt away. In Snowden, I was
constantly distracted by the glamour of people being journalists, yet
also being in the US, or Hong Kong or Russia. There was no gloss,
here! Janine Gibson
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Financial Times, played with a Her-Own Girl Friday briskness and vim
by Joely Richardson) genuinely was in New York at the time, this
shouldn’t push at the boundaries of disbelief-suspension, and yet it
does.

Briskness and vim … Joely Richardson as Guardian journalist Janine
Gibson and Nicholas Rowe as the paper’s assistant editor, in Snowden

When it’s an entirely fictional character, set in this newspaper
that really exists, you have to wonder what the film is trying to say
with that. Paddy Considine admitted straight to our faces that he’d
had to “to wimp down a little bit
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Simon Ross, security correspondent, and this is a) because he’s in
this with Matt Damon, so has to be his opposite (a wimp); b) because
he’s gonna die in a minute, so you mustn’t fall in love with him;
and c) because he’s meant to embody the noblest search, for truth
without ego.

A mixed bag, then, for the newspaper as trope; very moral, not very
sexy. There are some neat observational lines that approximate the
trade pretty well – when Bourne is on his phone, directing him
through Waterloo concourse, telling him to go “east”, he surmises
correctly that he won’t know which way that is, adding “your
left”. But then there are other lines like, “This isn’t some
story in a newspaper, this is real. Do you understand me?”, to which
Ross replies, “Yes” – whereas in real life, he would say,
“Actually, all the stories in our newspaper are also real,” and
then maybe Bourne would reply, “What about that time you told
everyone to vote Lib Dem”, in the middle of which the CIA would
shoot Ross in the head.

Search for truth … Paddy Considine, right, with Colin Stinton in The
Bourne Ultimatum. Photograph: Universal/Sportsphoto/Allstar

Why Knightley has to work here, for The Woman in Cabin 10
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could be to convey in shorthand her sense of civic duty, or it could
be to give her a dusting of wholemeal flour (oh, there’s that pill
of a woman again, who could be drinking champagne but instead is going
on about the dead body she just saw), or it could be to give the whole
thing a Gaslight
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frisson, she’s a journalist that a bad guy could plausibly persuade
everyone was totally insane.

Sometimes the paper pops up on its own as just a thing people are
reading – in Wallace and Gromit, in Harry Potter and the Half Blood
Prince – and I want to say it’s there to signify: “This is the
baseline reading matter of the everyman.” Maybe in Wallace and
Gromit it is, but I think in fact it’s a global-audience thing, they
can’t use the Times because an American audience will go: “The New
York is missing and the font is wrong.”

In Killing Me Softly (2002) the Guardian is everywhere; its journalist
interviewing one of the other characters, another character
masquerading as a hack, all of them constantly reading it. It’s
widely thought of as the worst film of all time
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just a coincidence; no actual Guardian journalists were harmed in the
making of that film.

* The Woman in Cabin 10
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* NETFLIX
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* The Guardian
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