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The holidays are great for many reasons. Time off, celebrations with family, good food, and festive spirit all around. But above all, it’s the time of year where you’re allowed to watch Love Actually as many times as you want without judgement.
The 2003 Christmas classic is two hours and 25 minutes of pure holiday joy. And now, a Love Actually writer has addressed some of the questions and theories fans have long had about the nine intertwined stories that make up the best Christmas movie ever (don’t @ me).
Speaking to news.com.au, the movie’s script editor Emma Freud answered some burning questions about some Love Actually conundrums that you may or may not have pondered yourself.
First of all, does Liam Neeson’s character, the widower Daniel, have a crush on Karen, played by Emma Thompson? The fact that Daniel accidentally calls Claudia Schiffer’s character Carol by the name Karen had fans wondering if this is some kind of Freudian slip.
“No, that was genuinely a mistake by Richard [Curtis, director of the movie] who had forgotten that Emma Thompson’s character was called Karen,” says Freud. Glad we cleared that up.
Freud also said that while it technically fits the storyline that the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, Annie, played cupid and brought the PM and his assistant Natalie together (she chooses Natalie’s Christmas card out of a selection of presumably thousands of cards), this was not in the script.
“That was certainly not in Richard’s mind,” Freud tells news.com.au. “But I think he’ll want to agree with it because that idea does make a lot of sense.”
Finally, Freud addressed one of the cutest scenes in the movie, that could have played out quite differently, had the wrong person answered the door. In the scene where Andrew Lincoln’s heartbroken character Mark declares his love to Juliet (played by Keira Knightley) in a pretty adorable way, what would have happened if Juliet’s husband had answered the door?
“Maybe he would have given him the CD player as a Christmas gift and hidden the cards behind his back,” says Freud. That would still have been pretty awkward, though.
One question that still remains unanswered is this: WHY and HOW could Alan Rickman do that to Emma Thompson. We’re still not over that.
h/t news.com.au
