Though it’s officially classified as a romantic comedy, Love Actually—Richard Curtis’s intertwining tale of love and loss in London in the midst of the Christmas season—has become a staple of holiday movie marathons everywhere. Here are 25 things you might not have known about the hit film, which is celebrating its 20th anniversary.
1. Love Actually’s airport footage was shot with hidden cameras.
Footage of passengers being welcomed and embraced by loved ones at Heathrow Airport was shot on location with hidden cameras for a week. In the film’s DVD commentary, writer-director Richard Curtis explains that when something special was caught on camera, a crew member would race out to have its subjects sign a waiver so the moment might be included in Love Actually. This was a fitting production device, as Curtis claims that watching the love expressed at the arrival gate of LAX is what inspired him to write the ensemble romance in the first place.
2. Four plot lines were cut from Love Actually.
Curtis initially aimed to include 14 love stories in the film. Two were clipped in the scripting phase, but two were shot and cut in post. Those lost before production involved a girl in a wheelchair, and one about a boy who records a love song for a classmate who ultimately hooks up with his drummer. Shot but cut for time was a brief aside featuring an African couple supporting each other during a famine, and another storyline that followed home a school headmistress, revealing her long-time commitment to her lesbian partner.
3. A fifth of Love Actually is commonly cut from television broadcasts.
It might be of little surprise that the raciest element of this holiday movie rarely makes it on TV. The love story of John and Judy has Martin Freeman and Joanna Page playing a pair of stand-ins on an erotic drama. Their scenes have the pair mimicking sex acts, but even as simulations of simulated sex, their storyline is usually deemed too hot for TV.
4. Martine McCutcheon’s role was penned just for her.
Curtis wrote his screenplay with some stars in mind, including Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson, and Martine McCutcheon, the charismatic English ingénue best known for her role on BBC drama EastEnders. So sure was Curtis that he wanted McCutcheon for the role of the prime minister’s assistant/love interest that he had the character’s name as “Martine” in early drafts. Curtis explained in the DVD commentary that the name was changed to “Natalie” before McCutcheon’s audition, “so she wouldn’t get cocky.”
5. Richard Curtis sent request letters to his American talent.
Laura Linney, Billy Bob Thornton, and Denise Richards received letters asking them to consider a role in the film. Both actresses were impressed by the unconventional move, but Linney told The Daily Beast she was even more flattered by its contents.
“I got a letter in the mail from Richard Curtis saying that he’d been trying to cast this part, and he’d kept saying to his partner, Emma Freud, that he’d been looking for a ’Laura Linney-type,’ and she said, ’Why don’t you ask Laura Linney?’”
6. Bill Nighy didn’t realize he had auditioned for Love Actually.
This was the first collaboration between Nighy and Curtis, with the former playing the shameless, comeback-seeking rocker Billy Mack. On the film’s 10-year anniversary, Nighy recalled to The Daily Beast, “I did a rehearsal reading of the script as a favor to the great casting director, Mary Selway, who had been trying to get me into a film for a long time. I thought it was simply to help her hear the script aloud and to my genuine surprise I was given the job.“
7. The film’s actors had their own trailer park village during production.
“We didn’t all film together, but we had a big trailer park for all the cast,“ Nighy told The Guardian. “There were so many famous people in there, we used to talk about being on Liam Neeson Way or Emma Thompson Road or Hugh Grant Avenue. And it was a masterpiece of diplomacy, too; we all had the same size and type of trailer.“ Linney remembered the place having a warm sense of community.
8. One scene was lifted directly from Four Weddings And A Funeral.
In Four Weddings and a Funeral, also penned by Curtis, there was a scene where Hugh Grant’s character Charles flirts with a woman at a wedding by mocking the terrible catering, only to discover that she is the caterer. The scene was cut from the 1994 film, but was reshot nearly a decade later with Kris Marshall acting out the flirtatious faux pas. In the commentary track, Curtis admits that some drafts of the Love Actually script still had Charles’s name on portions of the scene.
9. The late Joanna was played by a real-life Richard Curtis crush.
In the commentary, Curtis also confessed his affection and admiration for writer-director Rebecca Frayn and how it led to a heartbreaking scene in Love Actually. She’s uncredited in the film because she never has a scene to perform. But when Curtis needed images to create a slideshow of Sam’s beloved mum/Daniel’s departed wife, he turned to Frayn, asking for “all the prettiest pictures of her from her whole life.“ In real-life, Frayn is married to Oscar-nominated Scottish producer Andy Harries.
10. Emma Thompson shot her crying scene 12 times.
Arguably the saddest moment in Love Actually is when Thompson’s character realizes her husband has been unfaithful. In the privacy of their bedroom, she listens to Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now“ and weeps.
“We decided to do it like how Mike Newell did it in Four Weddings—I shot in medium-wide, and didn’t move the camera,“ Curtis recalled. “We just let it happen, and Emma walked into the room 12 times in a row and sobbed. It was an amazing feat of acting.“ He also noted this was the only scene she was asked to perform that day.
11. Hugh Grant did not want to dance.
Though Grant and Curtis had worked together on Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary, and Four Weddings and a Funeral, they had a deep disagreement on how the prime minister should be played. Grant wanted it to be a grounded performance and resented Curtis’s push to make the part more whimsical. This came to a head when shooting Grant’s dance number, which the actor refused to rehearse.
“He kept on putting it off, and he didn’t like the song—it was originally a Jackson 5 song, but we couldn’t get it—so he was hugely unhappy about it,“ Curtis explained. "We didn’t shoot it until the final day and it went so well that when we edited it, it had gone too well, and he was singing along with the words!“ It was a tricky thing to cut, but the final result with Girls Aloud’s cover of “Jump (For My Love)” speaks for itself.
12. Tony Blair found it impossible to live up to Hugh Grant’s fictional prime minister.
In 2005, when facing criticism for his dealings with the United States, then-Prime Minister Tony Blair responded by saying, “I know there’s a bit of us that would like me to do a Hugh Grant in Love Actually and tell America where to get off. But the difference between a good film and real life is that in real life there’s the next day, the next year, the next lifetime to contemplate the ruinous consequences of easy applause.“
13. It took 45 minutes to pick out Aurelia’s underwear.
When the loose pages of Jamie’s (Colin Firth) in-progress novel blow into a nearby lake, Aurelia (Lúcia Moniz) is quick to strip down and dive in to rescue them. But in the DVD commentary, Curtis admits that what she wore beneath her cozy sweater was a major matter of debate that involved a lengthy meeting with his producers and 20 different sets of bras and panties to be considered.
14. Simon Pegg auditioned for Love Actually.
Before he broke out with 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, Simon Pegg was best known for his work on the British sitcom Spaced. It was in this stage of his career that he was eyed for the role of Rufus, the jewelry salesman in Love Actually. However, Curtis ended up casting Rowan Atkinson, who was not only a bigger star but a longtime friend from their college days; the two had previously worked together on Four Weddings and A Funeral, Mr. Bean, and Black Adder.
15. Rowan Atkinson’s character was meant to be an angel.
Rather than just an overenthusiastic gift wrapper with a good Samaritan streak at the airport, Atkinson’s Rufus was initially written as a heavenly helper in disguise. A scene was even shot were he’d evaporate after helping Sam get past security at Heathrow. “But in the end,“ Curtis said in commentary, “the film turned out so sort of multiplicitous that the idea of introducing an extra layer of supernatural beings was (too much).“
16. Sarah’s apartment is based on Helen Fielding’s.
When Sarah (Laura Linney) takes her office crush Karl (Rodrigo Santoro) back to her flat, a crane shot reveals that her bedroom is perched above the first floor, with a half-wall serving as a sort of balcony. In the DVD commentary track, Curtis mentioned this layout was poached from the Bridget Jones’s Diary author’s home. To him, it seemed a charming staging place for this tender seduction scene.
17. Test audiences spurred a change to the ending of Sarah’s story.
Curtis originally intended for Sarah and Karl’s love story to fizzle out after the phone call from her brother. However, when Love Actually was screened to test audiences, the feedback begged for a clearer resolution. So Curtis provided it, creating an extra scene in reshoots that made it unmistakable that Sarah and Karl would not end up together. “Be careful what you wish for,“ he warned on the DVD commentary.
18. Andrew Lincoln hand-wrote those romantic signs.
In 2013, The Walking Dead star reminisced about his climactic gesture in Love Actually with Entertainment Weekly and revealed that handwriting was all his. “It’s funny, because the art department did it, and then I said, ‘Well, can I do it?’ because I like to think that my handwriting is really good. Actually, it ended up with me having to sort of trace over the art department’s, so it is my handwriting, but with a sort of pencil stencil underneath.“
19. The American bar scene included some improv.
Regarding the scene where three American girls (Elisha Cuthbert, January Jones, and Ivana Milicevic) flirt with Kris Marshall, Cuthbert told VH1, “It was such a creative space and we were allowed to improvise and try different things and it wasn’t just completely set into Richard’s writing. I mean we were allowed to sort of venture … It was nice that we got to sort of play around.“
Curtis remembers it differently, noting in the commentary track that the Brits were “respectful“ with his script, but these Americans wanted to “pep it up a bit.“
20. Bernard is a running joke based on a real man.
Every film Curtis writes contains a “Bernard,“ and he’s always the butt of a joke. In Love Actually, he’s the son of Thompson’s character who is described as “horrid.“ This all dates back to a love triangle that didn’t turn in Curtis’s favor. Bernard was the name of a young man who won the heart of Curtis’s crush Anne, and so he will forever be lampooned. In real life, Bernard is a successful politician, namely Bernard Jenkin, member of Parliament since 2010.
21. Olivia Olson’s performance of “All I Want for Christmas Is You” was too good—which was problematic.
Over 200 girls auditioned for the part of Joanna, the talent show star that young Sam (Thomas Brodie-Sangster) falls hard for. But with pipes that blew away the casting director, Olivia Olson blew the competition away. In the commentary track, Curtis notes that Olson sang the song “All I Want For Christmas Is You“ so flawlessly that he feared it sounded manufactured. He had sound editors cut in breaths to the performance to make it more believable.
22. Sam and Joanna reunited in 2008.
Child stars Thomas Brodie-Sangster and Olivia Olson were utterly adorable together as drum-playing Sam and his grade school crush Joanna. But Love Actually wasn’t the end of the pair’s onscreen romance. They were reunited in 2008 when Olson joined the voice cast of the Disney Channel cartoon show Phineas and Ferb. While Brodie-Sangster lends his voice to the oft-silent Ferb, Olson often sings as Ferb’s crush, the sleek and cool Vanessa Doofenshmirtz.
23. The movie has already been remade—four times!
The central concept of a movie packed with stars and intertwining love stories has been translated into a quartet of films. The first two came in 2007, with the Dutch film Love is All and India’s Salute to Love. Next, Poland took a turn with Letters to Santa (2011). The most recent version is Japan’s It All Began When I Met You (2013), which borrows the concept as well as the film’s poster layout.
24. Love Actually got a sequel (of sorts) in 2017.
In March 2017, in celebration of Red Nose Day, Curtis and several members of the original cast—including Grant, Knightley, Firth, Neeson, Nighy, Lincoln, and Atkinson—reprised their characters for a short film, Red Nose Day Actually, that caught viewers up on what the characters are doing today.
“I would never have dreamt of writing a sequel to Love Actually, but I thought it might be fun to do 10 minutes to see what everyone is now up to,“ Curtis said when the project was announced. “Who has aged best?—I guess that’s the big question ... or is it so obviously Liam?“ The short debuted in the U.K. on March 24, 2017, but American audiences had to wait until May 25, 2017 to see what happened to their favorite characters. (Here’s a cheat sheet.)
25. Alan Rickman’s death prevented Emma Thompson from appearing in the sequel.
When it was announced that Curtis would be revisiting some of the Love Actually characters for a short sequel, he knew right away that out of respect for Alan Rickman—who passed away in early 2016—he did not want to revisit Emma Thompson’s character.
“Richard wrote to me and said, ’Darling we can’t write anything for you because of Alan,’ and I said, ’No of course, it would be sad, too sad,’“ Thompson explained. “It’s too soon. It’s absolutely right because it’s supposed to be for Comic Relief, but there isn’t much comic relief in the loss of our dear friend really only just over a year ago.“
But the 2003 film wasn’t the end of the story for Thompson and Rickman’s characters. In 2015, Curtis’s longtime partner Emma Freud live tweeted some details of what happened to the couple after the credits rolled. The short version? “They stay together but home isn’t as happy as it once was,“ according to Freud.
A version of this story ran in 2018; it has been updated for 2023.
This article was originally published on www.mentalfloss.com as 25 Surprising Facts About ’Love Actually’ for Its 20th Anniversary.