Katharina Buczek
Since being released in 2003, Love Actually has become a staple Christmas movie among romance and comedy fans alike.
The flick featured monumental stars– such as Hugh Grant, Colin Firth, Emma Thompson, Liam Neeson, and Kiera Knightley– and followed the lives of eight very different but seemingly intertwined love stories to reveal the one emotion that connects all of us as humans.
And with its twenty-year anniversary quickly approaching, the movie continues to hold the hearts of fans hostage while attracting new viewers every single year. But, even if you know the film’s script like the back of your hand, some of these secret behind-the-scenes facts might seriously shock you.
1. Hugh Grant Did Not Enjoy His Dancing Scene
Women everywhere swooned when the fifty-nine-year-old (now) silver fox pranced around and shook his behind to Jump by The Pointer Sisters in his Downing Street home. But, a Daily Beast interview with director Richard Curtis revealed that Hugh was seriously grumpy about the whole scene.
“The fault line was the dance because there was no way he could do that in a prime ministerial manner. Hugh 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 said.
So, Hugh and the film’s production team actually did not end up shooting that scene until the very final day.
To Curtis’ surprise, though, the dance went so well that Hugh actually sang along to the lyrics– which made the editing team’s job surprisingly more difficult.
“When you edit a dance sequence like that, it’s going to be a third of the length, and the bit he’s singing the words to isn’t going to be the bit of that moment, so it was incredibly hard to edit.”
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