Actress Keira Knightley revealed that the controversial “Love Actually” cue card scene which sparked debate amongst rom-com fans and her fellow cast and crew was a “creepy and sweet” moment.
Knightley, 39, recalled Friday how a group of construction workers approached her recently and they held up cue cards in homage to the iconic scene from the 2003 holiday movie.
“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,” Knightley said on “The Graham Norton Show.” “It was creepy and sweet at the same time, much like it was in the film.”
The controversial scene happened when hopeless romantic Mark, played by “The Walking Dead star Andrew Lincoln, confessed his love to Knightley’s character, Juliet, as her husband and Mark’s best friend Peter, played by Chiwetel Ejiofor, sat in the next room.
In the two-time Golden Globe-nominated film, Mark showed up at the couple’s door and used cue cards to confess his love to Juliet while playing the song “Silent Night” under the guise of Christmas Carolers.
The large love notes read in part “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 film’s director Richard Curtis also admitted in hindsight that the scene in the hit holiday flick was abnormal.
“I think it’s a bit weird,” Curtis told The Independent in 2023. “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.”
However, Knightley’s co-star Martine McCutcheon said she “doesn’t think it’s creepy at all.’”
“I think people do crazy things when they are in love with people,” McCutcheon told Digital Spy in 2020. “He had his moment where he thought ‘Enough now, I’ve told her how I feel, I love my friend too but I had to get it off my chest in the right way.”
“She’d already seen the video, and I think it was his way of making things explained and comfortable.”
Even fans have mixed feelings.
“The cue card guy is extremely creepy. He does recognize they can’t be together but for some reason decides to wait until after they are married [to confess his love],” one fan wrote on Reddit.
“In the context of the movie, what he did wasn’t creepy,” another viewer commented. The theme is that love, as much as we’d like to believe it is, isn’t something we choose, it’s more powerful than that. We’d love to choose who we love and who loves us back but that’s not how it works ‘actually.,”
The “Pride & Prejudice” star is married to British composer Jamie Righton. They met in early 2011 after being introduced to each other by a mutual friend during a dinner party and tied the knot in 2013. They share two daughters, Edie and Delilah
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