“The slightly stalkerish aspect of it — I do remember that,” Knightley recalled of the way Mark (Andrew Lincoln) chose profess his love for her character Juliet when they were filming.
More than 20 years after the romantic comedy, Love Actually, cemented itself as a Christmas classic, one of its stars, Keira Knightley is looking back on the less-than-romantic aspects of the film.
In a new interview with the Los Angeles Times, Knightley said much like audiences, she too has come to see her Love Actually cue card scene with Mark (Andrew Lincoln) as “quite creepy.” In fact, she thought that while they were filming.
“The slightly stalkerish aspect of it — I do remember that,” Knightley told the Times of the way Mark chose profess his love for her character Juliet when they were filming. “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 [in a dramatic whisper], ‘But it is quite creepy.’ And then having to redo it to fix my face to make him seem not creepy.”
In the 2003 film, Juliet marries Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) as his best friend Mark films the ceremony. After Juliet discovers that Mark only filmed her during the reception, he ends up professing his love for her with a series of cue cards outside their house, unbeknownst to Peter, who thinks its just carolers at the door.
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Knightley also addressed the age gap between her and her on-screen love interest, which has also garnered criticism in recent years; the actress was 17, while Lincoln and Ejiofor, meanwhile, were 30 and 26, respectively.
“I mean, there was a creep factor at the time, right? Also, I knew I was 17,” she noted. “It only seems like a few years ago that everybody else realized I was 17.”
Knightley, whose role in the film came after her breakout success in 2003’s Pirates of the Caribbean, also spoke on the the “big price” that came with encountering fame at such a young age.
The now 39-year-old said she was “stalked by men” following the success of the Disney film, and what’s worse, is she was told she deserved the bad behavior.
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“It’s very brutal to have your privacy taken away in your teenage years, early 20s, and to be put under that scrutiny at a point when you are still growing,” Knightley told the Times. “Having said that, I wouldn’t have the financial stability or the career that I do now without that period. I had a five-year period between the age of 17 and 21-ish, and I’m never going to have that kind of success again. It totally set me up for life. Did it come at a cost? Yes, it did. It came at a big cost.”
She said that the behavior she incurred was often so “shocking” that her “jaw dropped at time” over how she was treated by the public and “I didn’t think it was ok at the time. I was very clear on it being absolutely shocking. There was an amount of gaslighting to be told by a load of men that ‘you wanted this.’ It was rape speak. You know, ‘This is what you deserve.’ It was a very violent, misogynistic atmosphere.”
“They very specifically meant I wanted to be stalked by men,” Knightley continued. “Whether that was stalking because somebody was mentally ill, or because people were earning money from it — it felt the same to me. It was a brutal time to be a young woman in the public eye.”
Social media also played a role, Knightley said, adding that a lot of young starlets don’t survive being shamed publicly at such a young age.
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“Social media has put that in a whole other context, when you look at the damage that’s been done to young women, to teenage girls. Ultimately, that’s what fame is — it’s being publicly shamed,” she explained. “A lot of teenage girls don’t survive that.”
Knightley, who has earned two Oscar nominations over the course of her career so far, said those early years also came saw her craft criticized, which the press calling her a “bad” actor during the course of her Pirates run.
“It’s a funny thing when you have something that was making and breaking you at the same time,” Knightley said. “I was seen as shit because of them, and yet because they did so well I was given the opportunity to do the films that I ended up getting Oscar nominations for. They were the most successful films I’ll ever be a part of and they were the reason that I was taken down publicly. So they’re a very confused place in my head.”
