Keira Knightley recalled an “quite creepy” experience with the Love Actually director Richard Curtis filming the famous cue card scene with Andrew Lincoln.
The actress recently opened up to the Los Angeles Times about filming the memorable scene in the movie, admitting she found it creepy at the time.
Knightley was just 17 years old when she starred in the 2003 Christmas classic, which shot her to global fame alongside Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl.
The scene in question features Andrew Lincoln’s character confessing his love for Knightley’s character using cue cards, despite her being married to his best friend, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor.
The cards famously read, “Let me say, without any hope or agenda, just because it’s Christmas (and at Christmas you tell the truth) to me you are perfect,” in a moment that some viewers now find unsettling.
“The slightly stalker-ish aspect of it — I do remember that,” Knightley recalled.
“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, ‘But it is quite creepy.’ And then having to redo it to fix my face to make him seem not creepy.”
Asked if she recognized the creep factor back then, Knightley said, “I mean, there was a creep factor at the time, right? Also, I knew I was 17. It only seems like a few years ago that everybody else realized I was 17.”
Curtis has also acknowledged the evolving perception of the scene.
In 2023, he told The Independent, “We didn’t think it was a stalker scene. But if it’s interesting or funny for different reasons [now] then, you know, God bless our progressive world.”
