Love Actually is meant to be an antidote to Hollywood romances and happily-ever-after endings. Its mix of vulnerability, sentimentality, and disarming goofiness has made it a Christmas movie classic for decades, but there’s also plenty of ick. Actor Keira Knightley recently shared her own reaction to one of the movie’s most infamous scenes.
It comes near the end when all of the characters are coming to terms with their individual situations on Christmas Eve. Mark, played by Andrew Lincoln, has recently revealed that he’s in love with Juliet, played by Knightley, who happens to be married to his best friend, Peter, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.
Mark shows up at her and Peter’s house on December 24 and delivers a presentation via boombox and cue cards explaining his feelings for her and how he will put them aside to just be friends. It’s a catharsis that only comes after she previously discovered his recording of her wedding, complete with a stalker’s focus exclusively on her.
“The slightly stalkerish aspect of it—I do remember that,” Knightley recently told the L.A. Times as part of a press tour for her new Netflix thriller series Black Doves. “My memory is of [director] Richard [Curtis], 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 [in a dramatic whisper], ‘But it is quite creepy.’ And then having to redo it to fix my face to make him seem not creepy.”
In retrospect, you can still look back and read Knightley’s scrunch-faced reaction as her character being slightly put-off by the whole stunt, though the scene itself is shot and edited in such a way as to signal that we should see it all as romantic and endearing. Of course, adding to the creep factor is that Knightley was also only 17 at the time the movie was shot. “I mean, there was a creep factor at the time, right?” she added. “Also, I knew I was 17. It only seems like a few years ago that everybody else realized I was 17.”
Love Actually came out the same year as Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which catapulted Knightley into the upper echelons of stardom. She said the ensuing hyper-scrutiny from fans, media, and others made the success come at a great cost. “I had a five-year period between the age of 17 and 21-ish, and I’m never going to have that kind of success again,” she told the L.A. Times. “It totally set me up for life. Did it come at a cost? Yes, it did. It came at a big cost. Knowing the cost, could I, in all good conscience, say to my kid, you should do that? No. But am I grateful for it? Yes. But then that’s life, isn’t it? Luckily, my kids are completely uninterested.”
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