It’s that season yet again: Love Actually season. While the 2003 Richard Curtis flick is considered one of the best romantic comedies of all time—not to mention a Christmas classic (it’s one of the best Christmas movies on Netflix, so you can get your annual fix with a Netflix subscription)—one storyline has been deemed decidedly not romantic by fans of the movie, but it took awhile for the director to figure it out.
No, we don’t mean Martin Freeman and that strange porno subplot (though we did rank John and Judy’s story as the least enjoyable Love Actually couple)—we’re talking about that messiness between Mark (Andrew Lincoln) and Juliet (Kiera Knightley), his best friend’s wife.
Decades-old spoilers ahead! If you remember, the film features the very joyful, slightly over-the-top nuptials between Knightley’s Juliet and Chiwetel Ejiofor‘s Peter, with Mark as his best man. That’s all well and good, except Mark has been harboring secret feelings for his best bud’s new bride, a discovery that Juliet shockingly makes after watching Mark’s footage of their wedding.
Mark ends up revealing his true feelings to Juliet via that now-very famous scene in which he writes out his romantic wishes on cue cards (“To me, you are perfect, and my wasted heart will love you…” and so on), resulting in a chaste but illicit smooch between the pair. “Enough, enough now,” Mark says afterwards, suggesting that he’s putting his feelings aside for the good of his friendship, and we pop back up with the trio in the end all seemingly happy and platonic.
Now, after two decades, director Richard Curtis has admitted he realizes the Mark-and-Juliet storyline was actually problematic. Speaking with Collider during a press junket on the 4K release of Love Actually, the filmmaker said that Lincoln’s character was “a little too weird” in comparison with the rest of the film, but it took someone asking for an interview on the topic for him to realize how the scene comes off.
I am very often told it’s a little too weird. It didn’t occur to me at the time, but times change. I remember someone once saying they would like to interview me about it, and they would be focusing on the stalking scene. And I said, ‘Oh, I didn’t know there was a stalking scene.’ They said, ‘Yeah, Andrew Lincoln. That’s, like, top-notch stalking.’ So, slowly but surely, I’ve realized what a dreadful mistake I made.
Still, it’s not the first time that Curtis has questioned the cue-card sequence. Per The Sunday Times, a copy of the Love Actually script—which was being auctioned off for charity—had been marked up by the director revealing doubts about the scene.
I came up with four things Mark could do as his big gesture. The people in the office chose their favorite and I went for it. I wonder: do we all regret the choice now?
As for the cast themselves, Lincoln and Knightley’s co-star Martine McCutcheon, who played the role of Natalie in the film, doesn’t think that Mark’s romantic gesture was “creepy.”
I don’t think it’s creepy at all. I think people do crazy things when they are in love with people. He had his moment where he thought, ‘Enough now, I’ve told her how I feel, I love my friend too, but I had to get it off my chest in the right way.’
Do you agree? Check out the famous scene below:
To me, it’s not perfect.