There are plenty of things about Love Actually that haven’t aged well. Most people who watch the movie today, though, agree that near the top of that list is a scene where Andrew Lincoln shows up at Keira Knightley’s character’s door and pretends to be carolers while showing her cue cards that confess his love. Knightley was just 17 years old when she was filming the scene and admitted in a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times that she told director Richard Curtis it was “creepy.”
“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.”
The actress, who filmed Pirates of the Caribbean that same year, was then asked if she felt creeped out by the scene while she was filming it.
“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,” she said.
Curtis himself admitted the scene had aged strangely during an interview with The Independent in 2023 but said the creep factor was not intentional. “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,” he said.
