Image via ITV
Published Feb 15, 2026, 3:10 PM EST
Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.
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Before Keira Knightley became synonymous with Regency-era chignons and polluting the shades of Pemberley, she was already deep in the business of suffering beautifully in corsets. (On screen, that is.) Some three years prior to her Pride and Prejudice debut – a role that would cement her as the face of a generation’s Jane Austen obsession, Knightley delivered one of her most emotionally punishing performances in a very different adaptation. The 2002 Doctor Zhivago miniseries (now on Plex), which first aired on ITV before migrating across the pond to PBS, was a sprawling, snowy epic that asked the then-unknown actress to live through war, abuse, and the kind of love story that mostly just disappoints, all while barely in her late teens.
It’s not the adaptation of Boris Pasternak’s iconic Russian novel that people talk about first. (That would be David Lean’s 1965 film, filled with grandeur and a Julie Christie performance for the ages.) But revisiting the miniseries now, with some distance from the movie everyone remembers, it’s obvious: this is where Knightley learns the fine art of cinematic suffering. All that yearning, repression, and quiet rebellion on display in films like Atonement, Anna Karenina, and The Duchess originated here. In other words, this is where Keira Knightley’s period drama era actually begins.
'Doctor Zhivago' Puts Keira Knightley In the Middle of a Bleak Fairy Tale
Image via ITVAt its heart, Doctor Zhivago is basically a very bleak fairy tale. The miniseries really commits to that idea, following its characters across decades of Russian turmoil, from the fall of the Tsar to World War I, the revolution, and the resulting civil war. Knightley’s Lara isn't some grand, romantic figure when she enters the story, just a young woman boxed in by circumstances she didn’t choose. Her mother’s money problems push her toward Victor Komarovsky (Sam Neill), a rich, smooth-talking predator who knows exactly how much power he has. He forces her into a relationship, eventually sexually assaulting her, before Lara is able to escape. She becomes involved with a different man, an idealistic revolutionary named Pasha, but their marriage is also filled with turmoil and secrets. So, when she eventually meets Yuri Zhivago (Hans Matheson), Lara already understands that desire usually comes with consequences…and that women tend to be the ones who absorb them.
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That’s why Knightley’s Lara feels so grounded, and so reminiscent of her more famous roles to follow. She isn’t dreamy or naïve; she’s wary, watchful, and carrying a lot of quiet anger. The story keeps testing that wariness, dragging Lara through years of upheaval where stability is always temporary, and happiness is never guaranteed. She’s separated from Yuri, reunited with him, and torn away again as wars break out, governments collapse, and loyalties switch, seemingly overnight. She becomes a nurse, a wife, a mother, and a survivor while history keeps rerouting her without asking permission. Each time Lara and Yuri find their way back to each other, it feels less like fate and more like a cruel coincidence, a reminder of the life they might have had if the world had been less determined to intervene. They do get their love story, but it's shaped by loss, compromise, and an overarching sense of doom that never really lets up.
'Doctor Zhivago' Is the Definition of a Slow-Burn Romance
Image via ITVOne thing the miniseries actually makes much clearer than the film is how unromantic this whole world is. Instead of war making feelings bigger, it just wears them down. People vanish. Families splinter. Politics muscle their way into every private moment. Romance isn’t some grand escape; it’s a liability, sometimes even a curse.
Knightley plays Lara as someone who clocks all of this early. She’s someone who is emotionally ahead of everyone else in the room. She’s been through more than her fair share of trauma and learned quickly that no one, especially the men who claim to care for her, can protect her from hardship. There’s a sharpness to her performance, but because Knightley was so young when she filmed the series, there’s a hopeful innocence too. Yuri and Laura get plenty of quiet moments where their bliss is insulated from the chaos happening at home and abroad. They even create some…while surviving the battlefield, operating a makeshift hospital, and escaping Communism. It’s turbulent and frustratingly stilted, the kind of drawn-out when-exactly-will-they that practically invented the term "slow-burn" and is most definitely not for anyone who lacks patience.
Why 'Doctor Zhivago' Is Worth Watching Now
Doctor Zhivago is enormous: multiple timelines, a vast supporting cast, changing perspectives, a mind-boggling amount of politics to sift through. But somehow, Knightley learns how to stay visible and consistent in the middle of all that. By the time she’s staring across a foggy field at Darcy, she already knows how to sell longing with just a look. Sure, it’s not Lean’s sweeping epic, and the romance here barely registers sometimes, but that’s kind of the point. We need more morally messy, emotionally controlled storytelling, don’t we? Doctor Zhivago is a series that rewards patience. It’s slow enough that you can admire its archival footage, production design and obsessively detailed costumes.
But its biggest draw now is that it serves as a key chapter in Knightley’s evolution. This is where she learns how to carry a story with real weight, how to actually translate a piece of classic literature and still make it feel modern and fresh. Watching it now, you can see the origin of the period-drama queen we’d soon meet in those opulent English drawing rooms. Only here, a happy ending isn’t really the point.
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