Love, actually, might not be the best word to describe one of Keira Knightley’s most iconic film scenes.
The storied actress was only 17 when she joined the star-studded ensemble cast of “Love Actually,” a 2003 romantic Christmas movie that has since become synonymous with the holiday season.
Despite its popularity, Knightley admits she can’t remember much from her time on set.
“Most of my films I have either never seen or I have only seen once. So It’s nothing against ‘Love Actually.’ It’s lovely because it didn’t do as well as everyone thought it was going to when it came out. Suddenly, like three or four years later, it sort of took on a life of its own,” she told the Los Angeles Times.Â
“It’s the only film I’ve had that found this life afterwards. The problem is, I was on it for about five days. I was 17, so I don’t actually have any memory whatsoever of it.”
The movie, which weaves its characters together through a variant of love stories, includes a newlywed couple, Juliet and Peter, played by Knightley and Chiwetel Ejiofor, respectively. Their wedding is filmed by Peter’s best man, Mark (played by Andrew Lincoln), who is secretly in love with Juliet.Â
In what is now an iconic scene, Mark comes to Juliet’s door to profess his love for her, cue cards in tow. Standing outside the couple’s doorstep with a boombox playing “Silent Night,” unbeknownst to his pal Peter, Mark has Juliet read the cards, telling her his true feelings.
The scene hasn’t aged well, with many acknowledging a bizarre undertone of inappropriateness, one that Knightley can recall feeling on set and voicing to director Richard Curtis.
“The slightly stalkerish aspect of it – I do remember that,” Knightley reflected of filming. “My memory is of Richard, who is now a very dear friend, of me doing the scene, and him going, ‘No, you’re looking at [Lincoln] like he’s creepy,’ and I’m like, ‘But it is quite creepy.'”
“And then having to redo it to fix my face to make him seem not creepy,” she added.
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“I mean, there was a creep factor at the time, right?” Knightley, now 39, said. “Also, I knew I was 17. It only seems like a few years ago that everybody else realized I was 17,” she said of her age when filming. Lincoln, whom her character Juliet runs after and kisses, was 29 at the time.
Lincoln, for his part, remembered having similar concerns in an interview with Vanity Fair in 2017.
“I kept saying to Richard, ‘Are you sure I’m not going to come off as a creepy stalker?’” he said.
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In 2023, Richard gave an interview with The Independent where he acknowledged the inherent weirdness of the scene.
“I think it’s a bit weird. I mean, I remember being taken by surprise about seven years ago, I was going to be interviewed by somebody and they said, ‘Of course, we’re mainly interested in the stalker scene,’ and I said, ‘What scene is that?’ And then I was, like, educated in it,” he said. “All I can say is that a lot of intelligent people were involved in the film at the time, and we didn’t think it was a stalker scene.” Â
Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, Laura Linney and Colin Firth also appeared in the film.
