British actor Keira Knightley talked in a new interview about the iconic (and for some, controversial) cue card scene from the holiday classic “Love Actually” and admitted she found it “creepy” while filming.
Speaking to the Los Angeles Times about her new Netflix series, “Black Doves,” Knightley said she didn’t recall much of her work on the 2003 romantic comedy. She was just 17 and only on set “for about five days,” she explained.
But Knightley said she does remember feeling unsettled when Andrew Lincoln’s Mark silently confesses his love to her character, Juliet ― using the cards outside her home, at night ― while Juliet’s husband, (and Mark’s friend!) Peter (portrayed by Chiwetel Ejiofor), was unaware upstairs.
“The slightly stalkerish aspect of it — I do remember that,” Knightley told the Times. “I remember [director] Richard [Curtis] saying, ‘No, you’re looking at [Andrew] like he’s creepy,’ and I was 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 sensed the “creep factor” at the time, Knightley replied: “There was a creep factor, right? I also knew I was 17 — it only seems like recently that everyone else realized I was 17.”
Lincoln and Ejiofor have had similar takes on the scene.
“The story is set up like a prism looking at all the different qualities of love,” Lincoln told Entertainment Weekly in 2017. “Mine was unrequited. So I got to be this weird stalker guy.”
“My big scene in the doorway felt so easy. I just had to hold cards and be in love with Keira Knightley,” he added. “But I kept saying to Richard, ‘Are you sure I’m not going to come off as a creepy stalker?’”
Ejiofor, meanwhile, in August said of his and Lincoln’s characters: “I think if there was a conversation between the two of them afterwards, it could become heated.”
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“I’ve noticed over the 20 years or so since the film came out that sometimes people find it romantic ― the gesture, the cards, all of that stuff,” he told ComicBook.com. “And other times, people just think, ‘What is he doing? He should have been arrested.’”
Knightley, though, told the Times she is still proud of the film.
“It’s lovely because it didn’t do as well as expected when it came out,” she said. “Then, three or four years later, it took on a life of its own. It’s the only film I’ve been in that found this incredible second wind.”
Read the full interview here and watch the “Black Doves” trailer here: