Warning: Some SPOILERS lie ahead for The Woman in Cabin 10!Keira Knightley is back on the high seas, this time falling down a psychological rabbit hole with The Woman in Cabin 10. The movie serves as an adaptation of Ruth Ware’s 2016 novel of the same name, centering on Laura “Lo” Blacklock, a travel magazine writer invited for an ᴀssignment aboard a luxury cruise ship with a very small number of cabins traveling for one week in the North Sea.

As she immerses herself in the elite guests and lush atmosphere of the yacht, Lo is mortified to see a woman being thrown overboard the ship. However, when all the pᴀssengers are accounted for, and the ship resumes its course, she finds herself questioning her sanity as the people around her fail to believe her claims.

Knightley leads the star-studded Woman in Cabin 10 cast as Lo alongside The Brutalist‘s Guy Pearce, Art Malik, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Kaya Scodelario, Hannah Waddingham, Daniel Ings and David Ajala. Co-written and directed by Simon Stone, the movie also serves as a reunion for him and Netflix after his critically acclaimed 2021 drama The Dig.

In honor of the movie’s release, ScreenRant interviewed Keira Knightley and Simon Stone to discuss The Woman in Cabin 10. The co-writer/director opened up about his approach to adapting the novel, including the reasons behind his tweaks and his being inspired by an Alfred Hitchcock classic, while the star offered insight into her character’s mystery-solving dedication and not reading the book beforehand.

Stone Told Knightley Not To Read The Book As He Aimed To Make Some Changes

The Woman in Cabin 10 comes in the midst of a boom in psychological thriller novels with female leads being adapted for the screen. Whether it’s the relationship-centric Gone Girl, the childhood trauma-confronting Sharp Objects or Netflix’s meta parody The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, the mystery-driven genre is at an all-time height of popularity.

While many of the prior тιтles’ stars and creatives took in-depth looks at their source materials to prepare for filming, Knightley reveals she didn’t read Ruth Ware’s novel ahead of filming. But it wasn’t due to any kind of scheduling issues or a disinterest in doing so, but instead because Stone asked her not to, as he “made some changes” in translating the book to the screen.

Chuckling as he notes Knightley still hasn’t read it, Stone went on to admit “I’m not the target audience” for novels like The Woman in Cabin 10. Instead, it’s his wife who “reads a lot of books like this“, with his learning of Ware and her works when Netflix sent him the initial script for the new thriller.”I think Netflix often buys work that other people have optioned, but Netflix directly optioned this book,” Stone explained. “They were like, ‘This is in our wheelhouse. We’re going to get this.’ So they just sent it to me, because I’d asked for a thriller.”

In going into his approach to the material, Stone recalls being excited to “take a genre that hasn’t been around for a long time” and do something new with it, noting it as being a trend that “has been happening quite a lot since the birth of cinema“. In particular, the co-writer/director turned to Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes as a major inspiration, feeling it to have been an “incredibly groundbreaking” movie in his youth that was also “so scintillating“.

“There’s a woman chatting with another woman on a train, and then she falls asleep, and she wakes up and everyone says there was never a woman there,” Stone described. “‘What are you talking about?’ And that, as a premise, I was just like, ‘That’s so extraordinary,’ and I thought that it was an adaptation of that film, but it’s not. Ruth is obviously deeply influenced by that. So for me, it’s a Hitchcock movie that we can then turn into an incredibly contemporary film, which is fun.”

Knightley’s Character Is The Epitome Of “What A Good Journalist Is”

Where the protagonists of many psychological thriller stories of the same ilk are domestic characters who become wrapped up in their stories, be it due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time, or a dark past connection with a character. With Knightley’s Lo, however, The Woman in Cabin 10 offers a slightly different entry point by anchoring viewers from the POV of a journalist immersed in the mystery of the apparent missing person.

In reflecting on her character’s journey, particularly her dedication to solving the situation, Knightley describes Lo as being “a dog with a bone“, something she feels is the mentality “a good journalist” has in any story. Even when she’s presented with apparent gaslighting from other characters regarding the woman thrown overboard, the two-time Oscar nominee says “she’s not going to cow down to anyone” to get the truth.

“I loved about the character is that she absolutely doesn’t like something has happened, and ‘I’m going to prove it, and I’m going to figure this out’,” Knightley expressed. “She just goes, and she goes, and she goes, but it is the stuff of nightmares, knowing that you are right and that you’ve got the truth and everybody around you telling you that you are wrong.“

Stone also concurred that part of Lo’s drive comes from her understanding that “I’m going to deal with all of the psychological hurt and the ostracization and outsiderness” from her time on the boat eventually, but that for now, “I need to focus on telling the truth“. “Clearly, that’s a bludgeoning of your ego that’s going on there of why everyone is telling you, ‘You are making everything worse,’ and, as you say, that’s a nightmare,” Stone said.

What Else We Learned About The Woman In Cabin 10 From Guy Pearce, David Ajala & Ruth Ware

ScreenRant: Guy, I don’t know if the production schedules line up here, but this is the first role I’ve seen of yours since The Brutalist, and I think you sH๏τ that mostly in 2023. This one underwent principal pH๏τography in the Fall of 2024. The reason why I bring that up is that was such a monumental project, three-and-a-half hour runtime, a huge award season. Does your approach to acting at all change after undertaking such a mᴀssive project like that?

Guy Pearce: I don’t think so, and funnily enough, obviously, The Brutalist was a big role, and it was an epic film, but it probably didn’t feel as epic and as big to us making it as it appeared as a finished film. The music in that film and the ideas and the cinematography and all those things are so kind of powerful and effective that I think they translated onto screen far more so than we perhaps realized at the time. I don’t want to say it was just another job, because it was a really great script and a really great one to work on, but I think I approach things the same all the time usually. But they’re different, because each role is different, and the location is different, and the actors you get to work with are different people, so it always feels like a very different world each time, but my approach is the same.

ScreenRant: This is a great ensemble piece. David, you’re phenomenal as Ben. The relationship that Ben has with Lo, it seems like Ben is one of the only people that Lo can gravitate towards to trust in this circumstance, and there’s obviously a history between those two. Your relationship with Keira Knightley as Lo seems like one of the only people that she can trust, but it’s quickly unraveled in this film that there’s not really many people, if anyone, that she can trust. Can you kind of describe to me that relationship between Ben and Lo, and if you think Ben is someone that is trustworthy?

David Ajala: I guess what heightens this experience is the fact that it’s very claustrophobic. They’re on this yacht traveling to Norway, their breakup wasn’t the healthiest of breakups, and now here they are in such close proximity, and she has this issue, and she looks to him to be an ally, and he can’t commit to that. It does put him in a somewhat compromising position, because our man, Ben, is very ambitious, and he knows where his bread is ʙuттered, so as far as he’s concerned, if he hasn’t seen anything or if he has seen something, he’ll look the other way, but now he’s kind of forced into a situation where he has to consider that he could be complicit with something. I don’t think he’s ever been challenged. I don’t think his moral compᴀss has ever been challenged before in this way, and it just so happens to be challenged by his ex.

ScreenRant: Guy, I’ll wrap with this. One of your earliest films, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, is in the works to get a sequel. Obviously, the late Terrance Stamp pᴀssed away fairly recently. Is that a project that you’re still looking to do more with? Would you want to return to that world?

Guy Pearce: Well, I would, and, interestingly, I think because Stephan knew that Terence was very unwell. He actually filmed with Terence a lot of his dialogue, so we actually have that. And strangely, we’re in discussion about now how we utilize that, what we do to move forward. It’s still a pretty sensitive subject. Stephan became very close with Terence, so he’s a bit broken by Terence’s recent pᴀssing, so everything’s just sort of on hold at the moment. We’ll get back into more discussions when we can, but Priscilla is such a beloved film and world that I think people would probably love to see some more of it. But of course now, with Terence pᴀssing, we need to kind of think about what that is, what we do now. Something needs to be done, I think, especially to recognize Terence and all the great work that he did.

ScreenRant: Great to meet you as well. Congratulations on The Woman in Cabin 10 being adapted for a feature film. I’ve interviewed a lot of authors in my day. It can be kind of vulnerable to relinquish your work to a studio and have them kind of take their creative reigns. What gave you the strength to say that Netflix was the right partner to bring your work to life?

Ruth Ware: I know, right? It’s like waving your baby off to kindergarten and being like, “Please take good care of him.” It’s such an incredible team. Simon Stone is a brilliant director. I’ve loved so many of his other projects. The cast is amazing. So, although it did feel like a real leap of faith to say, “Go take my book, do with it what you will,” I always felt like it was in really, really good hands. I’ve been incredibly happy with the process.

ScreenRant: You mentioned Simon. I want to talk about him a bit as well, because I feel like you two had a bit of a creative relationship when it came to bringing this thing to life. What was that creative partnership like?

Ruth Ware: Well, actually, in large part, I was very happy to just hand it over. I think a book is such a different thing to a film and I feel like a lifetime of reading books and writing them has given me a kind of innate knowledge of how a book should be and what it should feel like. I know nothing about creating a film. I’ve never read a screenplay, I’ve never written a screenplay, and there’s so much in the book. We are right inside Lowe’s head. We see her perspective all of the time. We don’t really know what’s going on outside of that, and it’s so different to try to create that tension, but externally so. We feel those feelings, but what we are seeing, we know what we’re seeing, and I had no clue how to do that. So I was, I was very happy to let the experts and say, go make the changes you need to do and just make it as good as you possibly can.

Obviously, when it comes to feature film adaptations, there will be some things that are adapted one-to-one because they work on the page, and they’ll work on the screen, but there are also some things that are finagled a little bit to make sure that they work better for the context of an hour-and-32-minute runtime. If this is a spoiler answer, you can be transparent, but what was the one change that you saw Simon make, or the whole screenwriting process make, to your work that you were excited to see that you thought was almost done better than the book?

Ruth Ware: I mean, the ending is really different, and this is a spoiler, so don’t air this before it all goes out, but in the book Low never really gets her showdown with the main antagonist. It all kind of plays off-screen. If that’s not a weird term to use for a book in the film, she gets that moment, she gets that kind of closure, and I was so happy that they were able to make that work. I thought that was fantastic.

ScreenRant: I know you have a couple other works that could be adapted for feature films. It seems like we’re in this psychological thriller murder mystery renaissance right now with everything from the Knives Out franchise to the Agatha Christie books that have been adapted for feature films lately, which I love. The Woman in Suite 11 is one that I’ve had my eye on. Is that something you’d like to see on the big screen?

Ruth Ware: I mean, that would be incredible. Obviously, it would be amazing to see a sequel, but yeah, I mean, a few of my books I think are unfilmable, like just the way the twist works or the reveal works just couldn’t work on screen. But I’d personally love to see The It Girl on screen. That’s set in an Oxford College, and I feel like we’ve got a bit of a vogue going on with that, as well. So yeah, who knows.