The latest of the upcoming book adaptations that’s new to streaming this week is the movie for Ruth Ware’s bestselling thriller, The Woman In Cabin 10. Like the novel, it follows a journalist who gets invited on a fancy yacht to cover her latest story. While you’d think getting the opportunity to hang out on the water might be the stuff of dreams, when CinemaBlend spoke to Keira Knightley, the actress dispelled any fantasies we might have about the whole thing.
Ahead of The Woman In Cabin 10 becoming one of the new 2025 movies to stream with a Netflix subscription, I got to chat with Knightley and writer/director Simon Stone about the making of the psychological nail-biter. They told me that they spent three weeks on a real yacht shooting The Woman In Cabin 10, but there was a unique vibe on set. As Keira Knightley shared:
We couldn’t touch the walls. Like, we couldn’t go on the carpets. We couldn’t touch any of the furniture. We weren’t allowed to sit on anything. We weren’t allowed to lean against anything. So, we’re all kind of in the middle trying not to touch anything for 12 hours a day. I mean, it was intense.
Stone added that it was “deeply challenging” to represent the sort of “luxury and ease” that comes with being aboard the elaborate yacht when there were 70 crew members on board and a lot of largely expensive upholstery to think about.
For example, apparently the carpet was worth $200,000. As Keira Knightley continued:
As the actors, we were allowed on the carpets and on the seats when we were filming, but as soon as he said ‘cut,’ even if we hadn’t finished the scene, it was like, ‘Sorry, could you get off the, get off the seat. Please get off the carpet’ and you’re back kind of standing in the middle of the thing, off the carpet.
Simon Stone likened the experience to being treated like school children, and yes, that includes big-name actors like Knightley and her co-stars Guy Pearce, Hannah Waddingham and Kaya Scodelario. The director joked that one could produce an entire comedy about the A-list actors being “terrified” of the yacht’s gray carpet on the set.
I didn’t wanna pay for the carpet… We were all terrified of getting a bill for anything. We were terrified of this gray carpet. I’m like, that looks like any other gray carpet. And yet you are fluffing this carpet up. I’m not allowed to stand on the carpet. I have PTSD.
When we talked to Guy Pearce, he additionally told us that the crew for the actual boat was used for the crew in the movie as well, due to the need to conserve the amount of people on the yacht, which was already way more people than you’d usually find on that sort of vehicle. Luckily, it was just a third of the filming schedule. The actress, who recently starred in the acclaimed Netflix series Black Doves, also said this:
We weren’t allowed to eat or drink anything anywhere apart from tiny little designated areas where we’d all cram into the designated area.
The Woman In Cabin 10 novel was published back in 2016, which has sold over 10 million copies. Ruth Ware told us Knightley’s casting was beyond her “wildest dreams” for the role of Laura “Lo” Blacklock, who sees the gal in the cabin next to her go overboard before all the evidence quickly starts being covered up. The movie starts streaming on Netflix on Friday, October 10.