Some Deranged Nightmare Person Interrupted Keira Knightley's Broadway Debut to Propose to Her

Keira Knightley with co-stars Judith Light and Matt Ryan during a curtain call for ‘Thérèse Raquin’ (Getty Images)

Keira Knightley’s Broadway debut Thursday night didn’t go exactly to plan, thanks to some jerk who interrupted the show to shout a proposal at her.

Just a couple minutes into the first preview performance of Thérèse Raquin, in which Knightley plays the titular role, a man — it’s always a man who does these things — got up from his seat and made his way to the railing in the mezzanine at the Studio 54 theater. He then reportedly shouted, “Christ was born of a virgin! Keira marry me!” and tossed a bouqet of roses onto the stage.

Some audience members wrote online that the man seemed drunk. The composer and lyricist of Ghostlight, Matthew Martin, was in the audience and gave a detailed description of what happened to Playbill: “I was sitting in the rear mezzanine and it happened almost immediately after the show began. … [The man] was carrying a bouquet of roses and began spouting off about both Jesus and Keira Knightley. He proposed marriage and kept saying things like, 'You have five seconds, Keira!’ We couldn’t grasp if Jesus and Keira were the same to him, or if he was just preaching while proposing. He seemed very fanatical and very disturbed.”

According to Martin, both the audience and security were frightened the man might be dangerous but Knightley, ever the professional, didn’t miss a beat. As security was removing him from the theater, the man tossed the bouquet onto the stage which Knightley’s co-star Gabriel Ebert, who was also onstage at the time, kicked the side.

Judith Light and Matt Ryan also star in Raquin, which tells the story of a young woman (Knightley), unhappily married to her cousin (Ebert), who begins an affair with one of his friends (Ryan).

Thursday night’s interruption is just the latest in a series of high profile distractions at Broadway theaters recently.

Earlier this week, during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live, Matthew Morrison, currently starring in Finding Neverland, called it “a dark time” for audiences.

Recently, during a performance, Broadway legend Patti LuPone took a cell phone out of the hand of a woman who was texting during the show. She has threatened to retire from the stage because of the prevalence of cell phones during live theater performances.

A recent performance of Hand to God was derailed when an audience member tried to use an outlet on the stage’s set to charge his cell phone. And Hamilton writer and star Lin-Manuel Miranda took Madonna to task on Twitter back in April after she spent the show’s entire second act texting.