‘It is quite creepy’: Keira Knightley flagged ‘stalkerish’ aspects while shooting Love Actually

Keira Knightley has said that she found the much debated placards scene in festive favourite Love Actually “quite creepy” during the shoot.

Richard Curtis’s romcom, originally released in 2003 and screened on both small and big screens around Christmas ever since, features multiple intertwined storylines involving various sets of friends, relatives and lovers.

One is about an unreciprocated love triangle featuring Knightley’s character Juliet, her new husband, Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), and his best friend Mark (Andrew Lincoln), who appears to shun Juliet but whose real feelings emerge when the wedding video he has made largely involves lingering shots of her.

Mark then turns up at the couple’s house armed with a set of Bob Dylan-style placards in which he declares his love, and an audio recording of carol singers to mask proceedings so Peter remains unawares.

Considerable discourse has been devoted to the scene over the past 20 years, and the theory that rather than being a highly romantic albeit eccentric act, it is in fact sinister and coercive.

In an interview with the LA Times, Knightley said that although her age at the time – she was 17 – meant she could only be on set for limited hours, she was immediately conscious of the dissonance.

“The slightly stalkerish aspect of it – I do remember that,” she said. “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 [Andrew] like he’s creepy,’ and I’m like [in a dramatic whisper], ‘But it is quite creepy.’”

Knightley recalled “then having to redo it to fix my face to make him seem not creepy.”

The actor was asked if she sensed a “creep factor” about the scene while shooting, to which she replied: “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.”

However, Knightley said she was still fond of the film and amazed by its continued afterlife. “It’s lovely because it didn’t do as well as everyone thought it was going to when it came out. Suddenly, like three or four years later, it took on a life of its own. It’s the only film I’ve had that found this life afterward.”

Appearing on the Graham Norton show last month, Knightley said she is still frequently accosted on the street by people paying tribute to the film, and a group of builders held signs up to her when she was recently stuck in traffic. “It was creepy and sweet at the same time, much like it was in the film,” she said.

Ejiofor has also expressed scepticism about the plotline, saying he felt Mark’s behaviour in the movie was “undoubtedly” terrible. “If there was a conversation between the two of them afterwards, it could become heated,” he said.

Related: Love Actually at 20: Richard Curtis’s imperfect yet irresistible Christmas romcom

“I’ve noticed over the 20 years or so since the film came out, that sometimes people find it romantic – the gesture, the cards, all of that stuff – and other times, people just think, ‘What is he doing? He should have been arrested.’”

Curtis recently told Netflix, which is releasing his new animated film That Christmas, that the idea for the scene was approved by committee. “I remember very specifically doing it so I wanted to have a way that he could show Keira how he felt,” he said.

“I was in an office and there were about four people working in the office and I said what I’m going to do today is think of four ideas and then put them to the vote.”

“I went out and said to the four people working in the office if you were being flirted with, which of these would you prefer? They definitely picked the cards. so it was a community decision.”