It is a truth universally acknowledged that Emma Thompson‘s talents know no bounds.
After all, the Love Actually alum secretly helped write an iconic scene for 2005’s Pride & Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennet (Keira Knightley) butt heads with Charlotte Lucas (Claudie Blakley) over the latter’s engagement to Mr. Collins (Tom Hollander), according to the movie’s director Joe Wright.
“I remember the Charlotte scene. Deborah Moggach wrote the script and did a beautiful job,” Wright told People in an interview published April 22. “Emma Thompson came on and helped out with some of the dialogue.”
According to the filmmaker, the final scene came together when he visited Thompson—who won a screenwriting Oscar for 1995’s Sense and Sensibility—for advice and she suggested that they go for a walk in London’s famed Hampstead Heath park to brainstorm.
“I trotted behind her, and at a certain point on top of a hill, she instructed me to sit on a bench and get out a notepad,” Wright recounted. “She improvised that scene as I wrote down what she was improvising.”
