Yahoo Lifestyle Keira Knightley Told ‘Love Actually’ Director on Set That Cue Card Scene Was ‘Creepy’ at 17 Years Old: I Had to ‘Redo It to Fix My Face to Make It’ Less Creepy
Keira Knightley admitted in a new interview with the Los Angeles Times that she told “Love Actually” director Richard Curtis while filming the infamous cue card scene with Andrew Lincoln that it was all “quite creepy.” Knightley was 17 years old when she was filming the Christmas romance. Both “Love Actually” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” opened in theaters in 2003, turning Knightley into a global star.
The “Love Actually” scene features Lincoln’s character unexpectedly showing up at Knightley’s door with cue cards that express his love for her. The cards 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.” The moment is complicated by the fact that Knightley’s character’s husband (played by Chiwetel Ejiofor) is inside. Many viewers now consider the moment stalker-ish.
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“The slightly stalker-ish aspect of it — I do remember that,” Knightley said. “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.”
When asked if she felt there was a creep factor to the scene while filming it, Knightley responded: “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 himself admitted to The Independent in 2023 that the scene does read “a bit weird” all these years later, although he added: “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.”
Hate it or love it, the cue card scene remains one of Knightley’s most memorable movie moments. The Oscar nominee recently said on “The Graham Norton Show” that “I was stuck in traffic for ages recently and a car full of builders next to me started holding up the signs like in the movie. It was creepy and sweet at the same time, much like it was in the film.”
Head over to the Los Angeles Times’ website to read Knightley’s interview in its entirety.
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