On July 26, Deadline reported that “Bend it Like Beckham” will be bending it like Beckham once again, or so says its writer/director Gurinder Chadha. The original film, released 23 years ago in 2022 and starring Parminder Nagra and Keira Knightley was an indie sleeper hit, grossing $76 million on a $6 million budget.
The comedy ended up being the harbinger of Knightley’s astronomical rise into stardom — coming just one year before “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” and “Love Actually.” In it, she is one of two soccer playing girls (the other played by Nagra), who attempt to pursue the sport professionally (and it’s called football there, obviously).
“I’m excited to revisit the original characters and revive the enduring story and build on the legacy we helped to create for the women’s game,” Chadha said, adding that “I’m pretty certain that everyone’s going to want to come back” and that the original cast was aware the movie was in development.
Knightley told Jimmy Fallon in 2023 that she did not anticipate that the film would be any kind of hit. In fact, because people told her the title was “embarrassing,” she reassured herself that no one would see it. “It was the idea of it because, you know, women’s soccer was not as big back then,” she explained. “And so the idea of the whole thing was sort of ridiculous.”
The actual Beckhams, of course, are ever-present in the cultural conversation. The couple — David and Victoria — made a cameo in the original film, named in Beckham’s honor. David was also the subject of the Netflix’s “Beckham,” which ended up winning the Emmy for Outstanding Documentary Series last year. The show followed the both his and Victoria’s personal and professional lives, and its most famous scene became a meme-of-the-moment.
In the first episode (of four), Victoria said that both she and David came from working class families, to which David pushed Victoria to admit that her father drove her to school in a Rolls Royce. In 2024, editor Michael Harte discussed this scene with IndieWire. “You gotta give massive credit to [director Fisher Stevens,” Harte said. “That scene is, if anything, a representation of how good he was at getting people to relax in front of the camera. And also Tim Cragg, our cinematographer, who had the wisdom to keep the camera going back and forth. The person that deserves the least amount of credit is me, because it’s probably the least amount of editing in the whole series!”
A more Victoria-centric doc is set to release soon, also from Netflix, of which David said, “It took a minute to try and get her to agree with it… It wasn’t something that was easy. I think I’m the only one who could convince her and I did, eventually.” But he added that viewers would see her “in a delightful light.” The series will cover Victoria’s entire career. “I think it’s going to be really special. It’s so emotional, there’s drama — and the drama’s real,” David said.