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It has been a big couple of months for Keira Knightley. In October she starred (as a Guardian journalist, no less) in Netflix’s thriller The Woman in Cabin 10. Two weeks later she published her first children’s book. And now, to top it all off, she is making history in the only cultural medium that really matters any more: the middle-class Christmas television advert.
For Knightley is the star of the new Waitrose festive ad, which bills itself as “an industry first”. What makes it a first? Perhaps the fact that it is less an advert and more a four-minute romcom. No, really.
The plot of the advert is as follows. Joe Wilkinson plays a glum widower who bumps into Knightley in a branch of Waitrose. They hit it off immediately. They go to the pub. They make a lot of biscuits that look exactly like Joe Wilkinson’s face. They hold hands. Joe Wilkinson briefly suspects that Knightley is having sex with her own brother. Then he makes her a pie and they get off with each other in the snow. Tale as old as time.
And quite honestly, it works. This is largely to do with the fact that, as a short film about a normal man who falls in love with a celebrity, the advert is technically the equivalent of skimming the “plot” section of Notting Hill’s Wikipedia page. But it’s also very sweet and funny and heartfelt, and – unlike this year’s John Lewis advert – doesn’t belabour itself with avant garde nightclub flashback scenes that feel as if they were scientifically engineered to force people to cry.
Clearly, the casting of Knightley has a lot to do with the advert’s success. Thanks to Love Actually, Knightley is romcom royalty. There’s something comforting about the way in which she’s returned to a genre that she’s tried to distance herself from for the last 20 years. It’s the same feeling you got when Jim Carrey finally decided to stop making glum indies about dispossessed middle-aged men and start mucking around with Sonic the Hedgehog. It’s the joy of watching someone do something really well. Plus, it’s proof that she isn’t above doing stuff for the money, and if that isn’t relatable I don’t know what is.
However, you might want to take issue with the whole “industry first” thing. It isn’t the first advert to reference old romcom tropes, as proved by a 2023 Nissan advert about a man rushing to an airport to declare his love for a girl. And it might be punishingly long, but it isn’t that punishingly long when compared to the longest television advert ever made, which was a 14-hour Old Spice commercial made in 2018. Perhaps it’s the first advert where two people fall in love after eating biscuits that closely resemble a pile of beard hair. Who knows.
Also, it’s probably worth pointing out that at this stage I have only seen the Waitrose advert once. And all romcoms are charming the first time round, aren’t they? But this is where romantic comedies and commercials part ways. The former are supposed to be watched a handful of times over a lifetime at maximum. Whereas the point of a Waitrose advert is to shove itself down your throat as much as the budget will allow, in an effort to break your spirit and make you shop at Christmas.
Realistically, you will see the Waitrose advert dozens of times in the next six weeks. Now, imagine watching Love Actually dozens of times in a six-week period. I mean it. Stop what you’re doing, close your eyes and literally imagine what it would be like to watch all of Love Actually on an unrelenting month-and-a-half loop. Imagine watching an important Channel 4 documentary, but then having to sit through Love Actually in the middle. Imagine that you’re trying to watch a YouTube tutorial on how to bleed a radiator, but you’re not allowed to see it until you’ve sat through an unskippable pre-roll that consists of nothing but Love Actually in its entirety.
You’d go mad, wouldn’t you. Your bones would be pulverised and your brain would melt and blood would start gushing from your eyes. All the inconsistencies, as silly and illogical as they are, would harden in intensity until they started to feel like a profound personal insult. You’d be kept awake at night, quivering and paranoid that you’d be ambushed by Love Actually again when you least expected it.
In other words, what I’m trying to say is that Knightley’s Waitrose advert is lovely and sweet now. But ask me for my opinion closer to Christmas, and I suspect I’ll want to destroy it with a flamethrower.
