Keira Knightley may have starred in one of the most iconic Christmas movies of all time, but Love Actually still doesn’t make her holiday watch list. The actress, 39, opened up about one of her most memorable roles during a Dec. 9 interview on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, revealing she has another divisive film she prefers come the holiday season.
Knightley, who stars in the upcoming Netflix spy series Black Doves, shocked Fallon with her answer to his question about the 2003 romantic comedy. “You’re in one of the greatest holiday films of all time, Love Actually,” Fallon said during the interview. “Do you watch that when it comes on?”
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“No,” Knightley admitted, confessing, “I saw it on the premiere when I was 18, and I’ve never seen it since.” She insisted, “This is nothing about Love Actually,” revealing, “I don’t really watch anything I do. But I know that Love Actually obviously has become this massive thing. And for lots of people, it’s part of their Christmas.”
Fallon then questioned, “But what is Keira Knightley’s favorite holiday movie? What do you watch?” to which the Pirates of the Caribbean star responded immediately, “Die Hard.” While fans debate every year whether or not the Bruce Willis-led action film counts as a Christmas movie, it’s clear where Knightley lands in the viral argument.
Knightley has been speaking candidly about her Love Actually role a lot this holiday season, confessing in an interview with the Los Angeles Times earlier this month that the iconic scene in which Andrew Lincoln’s character confesses his love to hers via cue card felt “slightly stalker-ish” when she was filming it at age 17.
“The slightly stalker-ish aspect of it — I do remember that,” Knightley told the outlet. “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, ‘But it is quite creepy.’ And then having to redo it to fix my face to make him seem not creepy.”
“I mean, there was a creep factor at the time, right?” she asked, pointing out the 12-year age gap between herself and Lincoln at the time of filming. “Also, I knew I was 17. It only seems like a few years ago that everybody else realized I was 17.”
Curtis admitted to The Independent last year that the scene feels “a bit weird” all these years later. “We didn’t think it was a stalker scene,” he shrugged, “But if it’s interesting or funny for different reasons [now] then, you know, God bless our progressive world.”
