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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Ryan Gilbey

‘We thought with The Crown: “Is anyone going to watch this?”’ director Benjamin Caron on risk, realism – and royalty

Night Always Comes. Vanessa Kirby as Lynette in Night Always Comes. Cr. Allyson Riggs/Netflix © 2025
Vanessa Kirby in Night Always Comes. Photograph: Allyson Riggs/Netflix

It’s quite a schlep from Buckingham Palace to the mean streets of working-class Portland, Oregon, but it is one that Midlands-born film-maker Benjamin Caron and actor Vanessa Kirby have undertaken with their new thriller Night Always Comes, adapted from the taut novel by Willy Vlautin. Caron and Kirby met nearly a decade ago when he directed episodes of The Crown, in which she played the young Princess Margaret from behind a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Now Kirby stars as a former sex worker called Lynette, toiling in multiple jobs and living with her disabled brother (Zach Gottsagen) and their wrecked, wayward mother (Jennifer Jason Leigh). They have cobbled together the funds to buy their dilapidated house at a snip, only for Lynette’s mother to recklessly blow her half on a new car. Cue one manic night in which Lynette must make back the dough, by fair means or foul, or else be turfed out on to the streets.

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