Not every good actor is a good crier on screen. Just like anything else, to making weeping look authentic on celluloid, it needs considerable talent. If you overdo it, that is of course a problem, but if you underplay it too much, the larger audience won’t be able to connect with it. It might sound a little cruel if you put it without context, but Emma Thompson’s crying bit in the Richard Curtis directorial Love Actually (2003) is just a heart-wrenching, realistic piece of acting that will break your heart too. Incidentally, British star Kit Harington is of the same opinion. In fact, in an earlier interview, he has even gone as far as to claim that it’s his ‘favourite bit of acting’ ever.
Karen (a wonderful Emma Thompson) is married to Alan Rickman’s Harry (ironical, if you know your Harry Potter). But bored of his predictable and long-term marriage, he seeks excitement in an affair with a much younger Mia (Heike Makatsch), and right on Christmas, his wife catches on what has been happening. Karen and Harry are exchanging gifts by the Christmas tree with their tiny tots, and Karen is expecting a lovely piece of ornament she had seen Harry buy at the store. But she’s in for a quiet shock when she finally tears open her present — a Joni Mitchell CD. “To continue your emotional learning,” says Harry, and really, there has never been a moment when I have disliked the late Alan Rickman, not even when he was his meanest best to the kids of Harry Potter as Professor Snape. But one look at Emma’s shattered expression (which she does her best to hold back), and you are a goner.
What follows next is even more painful. Emma’s Karen goes up to her bedroom to give herself a moment. She closes the door and we see what she is seeing, the happy framed photograph of herself and her husband, then, her bed, which she has shared with her partner for god knows how long. Everything in the room is a piece of her and him together. And each of those things has now been tainted with his betrayal. This whole scene could have been so dramatic, but Emma’s controlled skills and Curtis’ direction work in tandem to create an enduring piece of cinema in an otherwise cheesy, soppy Christmas feature.
Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” plays in the background as Emma cries silently, half-determined not to let herself break completely as she keeps wiping the falling tears from her cheeks. And then comes the excruciating bit, of cleaning up and going back to the living room to her excited children and her unfaithful husband. I wept.
To channel the appropriate emotions, Emma remembered what she had been through after filmmaker-actor Kenneth Branagh had cheated on her with a younger Helena Bonham Carter. “I knew just how to play that part [of a wife who has stumbled across evidence of what might be her husband’s infidelity], I’ve had so much bloody practice at crying in a bedroom and then having to go out and be cheerful, gathering up the pieces of my heart and putting them in a drawer,” Emma had told The Telegraph in 2005. And to think that she had to do it 12 times! Curtis aptly called it, “A brutal bit of sorrow.” Another time at a fundraiser event, the actor had elaborated on the scene and said, “That scene where my character is standing by the bed crying is so well known because it’s something everyone’s been through. I had my heart very badly broken by Ken (Kenneth Branagh), so I knew what it was like to find the necklace that wasn’t meant for me. Well, it wasn’t exactly that, but we’ve all been through it.”
Since then, it’s all water under the bridge for Emma; the actor has even called Helena ‘a wonderful woman’ on one occasion.
Also on Scene Stealerthis heart-wrenching sequence from Marriage Story ft Scarlett Johansson, Adam Driver
Known for her comedic chops (both as a writer and an actor), Emma Thompson with that scene alone established herself as a brilliant dramatic actor.
You can watch Love Actually on Google Play.
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