Keira Knightley Calls ‘Love Actually’ Cue Cards Scene ‘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 “pretty creepy.” Knightley was 17 years old when she filmed the Christmas romance. Both “Love Actually” and “Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl” opened in theaters in 2003 and made Knightley a global star.

The “Love Actually” scene features Lincoln’s character unexpectedly showing up at Knightley’s door with cue cards expressing his love for her. The cards read: “Let me say, without hope or agenda, just because it’s Christmas (and at Christmas you tell the truth) to me, you’re 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-like.

“The slightly stalker-like aspect of it – I remember that well,” Knightley said. “My memory is (director) Richard (Curtis), who is now a very dear friend, of me doing the scene and he said, ‘No, you’re looking at (Lincoln) like he’s creepy,’ and I ‘ I’m like, ‘But that is quite creepy.’ And then I had to redo it to fix my face to make him seem not creepy.”

When asked if she felt there was a cringe factor to the scene while filming it, Knightley replied: “I mean there was a creep factor at that point, right? I also knew I was 17. It seems like it’s only been a few years since everyone else realized I was 17.”

Curtis himself admitted The independent in 2023 that the scene sounded “a little weird” all these years later, though he added, “We didn’t think it was a stalker scene. But if it’s interesting or funny for different reasons (now), 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 their signs like in the movie. It was creepy and cute at the same time, just like it was in the movie.”

Go over to Los Angeles Times website to read Knightley’s interview in full.