‘Love Actually’ Had a Lesbian Storyline Cut From Final Film

2023-11-20
11:31

We are getting some major rom-com tea 20 years later!

Filmmaker Richard Curtis revealed that the 2003 holiday romantic comedy ‘Love Actually’ originally had a lesbian love story.

A story that did not make the final cut in ‘Love Actually’ features the headmistress at the school attended by all of the film’s children, portrayed by Anne Reid, and her terminally ill wife, played by Frances de la Tour.

The scene shows Reid’s character coming home after a particularly exhausting day at work and having a conversation with her ill wife, who is suffering from an unnamed disease. It ends with Reid’s character struggling to go to sleep as her wife has a coughing fit, and then, we get to see Karen’s (played by Thompson) speech before the kids’ Christmas play to express her gratitude to the headmistress for being present despite her recent loss.

On the DVD’s bonus footage, Curtis provided details about the deleted scene and explained its exclusion saying that they could not include it “when we lost the bit with [Emma Thompson] and her son.”

The director added that the idea was meant to be that the viewers meet this stern headmistress, and then, 15 minutes later, we suddenly fell in with the character.

“You realize that no matter how unlikely, it seems that any character that you come across in life has their own complicated tale of love,” Curtis added.

In an interview with The Independent in September 2022, De La Tour recalled her deleted scene and character from the movie, expressing how “odd” it was that the producers cut it. De La Tour pondered that it was “too dark” to include in the final cut since the movie ended up being a “light and fluffy film.”

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