Emma Thompson explains what made the bedroom scene in “Love Actually” so heart wrenching

It’s been over 20 years since Alan Rickman broke Emma Thompson’s heart by buying that little office tart a necklace in “Love Actually,” and some of us still haven’t forgiven him. With its overlapping love stories set during Christmastime, the film has become a holiday classic, despite some controversy on whether or not it’s actually any good. Some people love it, some people hate it, but no one can deny that Thompson gives an Oscar worthy performance in one utterly heart-wrecking scene.

Of the eight “Love Actually” relationships, Harry and Karen (Rickman and Thompson, respectively) is the one that gives the film some serious gravitas. While other characters are pining or shooting their shot with varying levels of success, Harry is pulling a mid-life crisis affair with a modelesque coworker while Karen shuffles their children to and fro and keeps Harry’s life running smoothly. We see him lie, we see her start to suspect, but the scene where she opens her Christmas present from Harry a Joni Mitchell CD, not the necklace she had found hidden in his coat and thought was for her is when we see Thompson’s acting strengths in full view. Like, phew.

What’s so striking about the scene, however, is that it’s not dramatic in a typical way. There’s no external conflict happening it’s just Thompson excusing herself from the family to emotionally process what she’s just discovered in secret. We see and feel her heartbreak it’s so visceral but that’s not what makes the scene so powerful. Heartbreak happens all the time in movies. As Thompson explains in an interview with BBC Radio 1, it’s the fact that she can’t actually react the way she wants to that pulls at people’s heartstrings so hard.

“I think it’s just because everybody’s been through something like it,” Thompson says. “What I think really gets to them though is that she has to pull herself together. It’s not that she’s upset. That’s, you know, ten a penny. But it’s that she has to pull herself together.”

It’s true. The conflict in the scene is between her wanting to break down and her wanting to keep her family’s Christmas memories happy and intact. She is a devastated wife, but she’s also a devoted mother who doesn’t want to devastate her kids. We feel the tension between those two roles and the way she swallows up her grief in order to get her kids to their holiday concert right after finding out her marriage isn’t what she thought it was.

“I think it’s to do with the fact that we’re required in our lives to repress the things that we’re feeling,” Thompson explained on TODAY. “So, you can be hit right between the eyes with some terrible piece of news, but you can’t react immediately because you’ve got your children there. It’s that thing of not showing that’s why it hurts. That’s why it moves us.”

“If she went, ‘Oh my God! I thought you were going to give me a necklace! And now you’ve given it to somebody else,’ we would not be moved, you know?” she continued. “We’re moved because she just goes, ‘I’m not gonna do it.’ And then she makes the bed, the bed that sort of suddenly feels so empty of meaning. And then she goes down and goes, ‘Hello, everyone! Let’s go.’ That’s why people identify.”

And the way she plays it is perfect. Any actor can cry, but it’s her crying while trying not to cry and how she shows us her inner emotional turmoil without her ever saying a single word that’s impressive.

Some people have asked whether Harry actually physically cheated or not, but “Love Actually” script editor Emma Freud clarified that he did. “DEFINITELY had an affair,” she wrote on X in 2015. “I begged richard just to make it a flirtation, but no. the whole way.”

And did Harry and Karen stay together in the end? The film doesn’t really make it clear, but at the screening Freud answered the question: “They stay together but home isn’t as happy as it once was” of. There’s just no non-heartbreaking answer to that question.

This is why we watch films, though, isn’t it? To see our humanity reflected back to us? To feel what the characters feel? To have our hearts broken vicariously so we can have a good cry without going through the actual pain ourselves?

People usually watch romcoms for the romance and comedy and happy endings, though. So here’s to Emma Thompson and Alan Rickman for giving us one of the most poignant scenes in cinema in one of the most unexpected places.