Featured Image Credit: Universal Pictures
Topics: Christmas, Film and TV, Celebrity
Joe Yates
Love Actually is one of the most rewatched Christmas films of all time, but there’s one detail that still blindsides viewers every single year.
The 2003 festive rom-com has everything - from a star-studded cast, to nine storylines and even one rather questionable scene, but despite that, fans keep coming back to one shocking fact about actors Keira Knightley and Thomas Brodie-Sangster.
On-screen, the two couldn’t feel more different. Knightley plays Juliet, the newlywed caught in one of the film’s most famous love triangles involving her husband Peter (Chiwetel Ejiofor) and his best mate Mark (Andrew Lincoln).
Meanwhile, Brodie-Sangster plays Sam, a schoolboy trying to win the heart of his first crush Joanna (Olivia Olson), with his grieving stepdad Daniel (Liam Neeson), guiding him along the way.
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Seeing the two on the tele, you’d assume Knightley was a fully grown adult and Brodie-Sangster a literal child, right? Well, no - in reality, they’re just five years apart.
Knightley was 17 when filming, while Brodie-Sangster was around 12 years old.
One Redditor took to the platform to sum up everyone's reaction perfectly.
"Hey what the f****?" they wrote.
But that's not the strangest thing about the movie, which one user explained: "She was closer in age to him than both the actor playing her husband and Rick Grimes holding the sign."
Knightley's on-screen husband Ejiofor was 26 at the time, and Lincoln was 30 when he showed up at her door with cue cards and a boombox to confess his love.
Suddenly, that 'romantic' scene feels a bit questionable - something even director Richard Curtis has since addressed.
The Pirates of the Caribbean actor has spoken openly about how the scene felt at the time.
In an interview with the LA Times last year, the now 40-year-old said: "The slightly stalkerish aspect of it - I do remember that.
"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'.
"And then having to redo it to fix my face to make him seem not creepy."
She added: "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."
Curtis has since reflected on the casting, admitting it 'didn't seem too peculiar' at the time but questioning whether he’d do it today.
"The great thing now is that everybody is bold enough to say anything they don't particularly like in what you do - kind of gives you a filter these days," he told LADbible.