The scene Keira Knightley admitted was creepy: “Slightly stalkerish aspect”
From serving as a body double for the Queen of Naboo to defying gender norms in the world of football to battling pirates on the high seas, the early career of Keira Knightley is full of gems. Beginning her acting journey at the age of six, Knightley did the rounds in various TV shows, including a much-maligned version of Oliver Twist, before finally settling into a lucrative career on the silver screen.
Of course, no discussion of this chapter in Knightley’s story would be complete without mentioning Richard Curtis’ Love Actually. The cherished Christmas anthology sees Knightley play Juliet, a newlywed whose husband, Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), is secretly coveted by his best man, Mark (Andrew Lincoln). This culminates in one of the film’s most famous scenes—Mark standing on Juliet’s doorstep, silently professing his love through a series of giant placards. What he would have done if Peter had answered the door instead of his wife remains unclear.
Like much of Love Actually, the love triangle storyline has faced some reevaluation in recent years. Mark’s unrequited love for Juliet, which he expresses through videotaping her without her permission, doesn’t hold up at all under a modern lens. It isn’t just contemporary critics that think this, as Knightley herself has expressed her own concerns with the much-parodied subplot.
“The slightly stalkerish aspect of it – I do remember that,” she told the Los Angeles Times. “My memory is of Richard, 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… 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 realised I was 17.”
This had been contextualised earlier in the interview when Knightley discussed what it had been like to be a famous woman in the early 2000s. “Whether that was stalking because somebody was mentally ill, or because people were earning money from it – it felt the same to me,” she said. “It was a brutal time to be a young woman in the public eye.”
Unfortunately, this nightmare scenario would come true in 2010 when a 41-year-old man repeatedly harassed the star outside of a theatre she was performing in. This was followed by a similar incident in 2016. Knightley has since called for more protection for performers from unwanted public attention.
Love Actually is far from the only rom-com that hasn’t aged well, but something about the Juliet-Peter-Mark situation comes across as particularly egregious. Mark ignores his best friend’s long-term partner to the point where she thinks he hates her, only for it to be revealed that he’s secretly been perving on her the entire time? And then she rewards this behaviour by kissing him? It simply doesn’t add up.
One of the many flaws of Love Actually—another being that the Prime Minister pursuing a relationship with a staff member is somehow meant to be romantic—is that the cue cards scene will continue to be dissected, interpreted, and misinterpreted for as long as the film inexplicably remains a holiday favourite.
