Keira Knightley has always found the ‘Love Actually’ cue card scene ‘quite creepy’

Like everyone else in the world, Keira Knightley has strong feelings about a certain Love Actually confession — but she had them first.

At this point, it’s common knowledge that the film’s cue card declaration scene has not aged well. The “romantic” moment sees Andrew Lincoln‘s Mark use handwritten signs to silently declare his love to Juliet (Knightley), the woman who just married his best friend (Chiwetel Ejiofor).

Knightley, recently told the Los Angeles Times that while she doesn’t have the clearest memory of shooting the 2003 film, the “slightly stalkerish aspect” of that scene has stayed with her. 

“My memory is of Richard [Curtis],” she said, naming the film’s writer and director. “Of me doing the scene, and him going, ‘No, you’re looking at [Lincoln] like he’s creepy.'”

Knightley said she responded by whispering, “‘But it is quite creepy.’” 

Ultimately, to get the final take — which sees Juliet emotional and clearly charmed by Mark’s love confession — they had to “redo it to fix my face to make him seem not creepy.”

Alas, Knightley’s facial expression couldn’t save Mark from the effects of time. Fans of the film have since come to the consensus that Lincoln’s character showing up at her house, days after her wedding to another man, is both strange and alarming. But Knightley was ahead of the curve.

“I mean, there was a creep factor at the time, right?,” asked Knightley, pointing out yet another icky layer in the relationship dynamic: at the time of filming, Knightley was 17, while Lincoln was 29. “I knew I was 17. It only seems like a few years ago that everybody else realized I was 17.”

In his defense, Lincoln has also hinted that he also had his suspicions about how the scene would be received while filming it.

“He is a stalker,” Lincoln stated in 2016. “That was my question to Richard Curtis, ‘Do you not think we’re sort of borderline stalker territory here?’ And he said, ‘No, no. Not with you playing it, darling. You’ll be alright.’”

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Over time, the rest of the world has caught up with Knightley and Lincoln’s read on the relationship — including Curtis himself.

“He actually turns up, to his best friend’s house, to say to his best friend’s wife, on the off chance that she answers the door, ‘I love you,'” Curtis said last year, during a chat with the Independent. “I think it’s a bit weird.”

That said, the Notting Hill and Four Weddings and Funeral writer was initially surprised when he learned of the scene’s complicated reputation. “I remember being taken by surprise about seven years ago,” he said, “I was going to be interviewed by somebody and they said, ‘Of course, we’re mainly interested in the stalker scene,’ and I said, ‘What scene is that?’ And then I was, like, educated in it.”