Fans have debated and felt torn about Love Actually's iconic cue card scene since the movie was released in 2003.
Is the moment, in which Andrew Lincoln's Mark silently professes his love to his best friend's new wife, Juliet (played by Keira Knightley) in a series of cue cards on her doorstop while her husband/his best friend is mere feet away in the living room, more cute or creepy? Is Mark's earnest honest endearing enough to outweigh everything that makes the situation (including the seemingly obsessive fixation on Juliet demonstrated by the personal footage Mark films at her wedding) deeply uncomfortable?
Knightley thinks the answer is that it's both of those things—simultaneously.
The actress revealed in a recent appearance on The Graham Norton Show that fans still reference the Love Actually's cue card moment with her and shared a particularly memorable example involving a group of construction workers.
“I was stuck in traffic for ages recently and a car full of builders next to me started holding up the signs like in the movie,” she said, according to People.
As for how she felt about the encounter, Knightley said it was pretty much like the moment in the movie.
“It was creepy and sweet at the same time, much like it was in the film," she said.
Knightley isn't the first Love Actually alum to be asked about the long-debated cue card scene. In a November 2023 interview with The Independent, the film's director, Richard Curtis was asked to weigh in on the scene and admitted he understood why some viewers find it problematic.
"He actually turns up, to his best friend’s house, to say to his best friend’s wife, on the off chance that she answers the door, 'I love you.' I think it’s a bit weird," Curtis admitted, before stressing that, at the time Love Actually was made, "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."
