So many Brits! So little time! 135 minutes to be exact.
Here are 15 things you didn’t know about “Love Actually”
1) Kris Marshall (Colin) actually RETURNED his pay check for the scene where the three American girls undress him. He said he had such a great time having three girls undress him for twenty-one takes, that he was willing to do it for free.
2) The idea for Mark’s surprise of the band singing “All You Need Is Love” at Peter and Juliet’s wedding came from Jim Henson’s funeral where all the puppeteers brought their Muppets and sang a song.
3) The lake that Lúcia Moniz and Colin Firth are “swimming” in was actually only eighteen inches deep and they had to kneel down and pretend to be in deeper water. It was also full of mosquitoes and Colin Firth was so badly bitten that his elbow swelled up to the size of an avocado, and he had to see a doctor.
4) Director Richard Curtis and other members of the production had a forty-five minute meeting to determine what colour underwear Lucia’s character would wear for that lake scene.
5) The airport greeting footage at the beginning and end of the movie is real. Richard Curtis had a team of cameramen film at Heathrow airport for a week, and whenever they saw something that would fit in they asked the people they filmed for permission to use the footage.
6) Emma Thompson wore a “fat suit” to make her look heavier because she’s actually very thin.
7) This is a weird one… Billy Bob Thornton has a fear of antique furniture and Hugh Grant would sometimes flash a piece in front of him just before the cameras rolled, to see him freak out.
8) The scene where Colin accidentally insults the caterer’s food to her face, was originally written as a scene for Hugh Grant’s character in Four Weddings and a Funeral, but was cut from that film.
9) Thomas Sangster (13 year old Sam) plays the young teen Jojen Reed in “Game of Thrones”.
10) Laura Linney filmed this movie in London, while she was working on Mystic River in Boston. She flew across the Atlantic Ocean several times within a few months to do both movies.
11) This was Richard Curtis’s directorial debut. He wrote this movie and has also written the screenplays for Notting Hill, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bridget Jones 1 & 2 and is currently working on the script for the live action Little Mermaid.
12) Anthony Hopkins was considered for the role of Prime Minister (later played by Hugh Grant) but was filming The Human Stain at the time.
13) The film originally had 14 separate love stories, but four of them ended up being cut. One of them was about an African couple supporting each other through a famine and another was about a stern headmistress who was nursing her lesbian partner through cancer.
14) Claudia Schiffer was never meant to be in the film. Curtis wanted to cast someone who looked like her, but he couldn’t find anyone so he offered her the part.
15) When Olivia Olson (Joanna) recorded “All I Want for Christmas Is You” in the studio, producers thought she was so good that people wouldn’t believe it was really her singing, so they asked her to record it again “a little less good”. They also altered her voice to sound younger.