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Tonight is the night. The wait is finally over. The Love Actually 10 minute short sequel is airing on BBC One as part of this year’s Comic Relief line up. 14 years after the beloved film hit our screens, the cast has reunited in aid of Red Nose Day, in a script penned by the original writer/director Richard Curtis.
Uniting the cast for a charity sequel stays true to everything the original film stood for – unifying people in love. Bill Nighy, who plays rock legend Billy Mack, called Comic Relief “a sensational project. In a world that gets weirder and weirder, it demonstrates that people are still driven by their compassionate sensibility.” His statement resounds even more so following the tragic events that London has witnessed this week.
“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. General opinion’s starting to make out that we live in a world of hatred and greed, but I don’t see that. It seems to me that love is everywhere. Often it’s not particularly dignified or newsworthy, but it’s always there – fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, old friends. When the planes hit the Twin Towers, as far as I know none of the phone calls from the people on board were messages of hate or revenge – they were all messages of love. If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love actually is all around.” – Love Actually, 2003
The fans of the original film are not the only ones who are excited about the sequel, the star-studded cast have been incredibly supportive in the process with Martine McCutcheon saying that she couldn’t sleep due to her excitement when she got the call and Liam Neeson let slip that he was brought to tears by the script.
However not every character will be reprising their role, unfortunately Emma Thompson was unable to take part due to her emotional attachment to the late Alan Rickman, who played her husband in the original. When asked whether the sequel would feature Emma and a nod to Alan, Richard Curtis said “Ems [Thompson] isn’t in it. She just can’t do it.”
In what has been teased and hinted at in the months running up to this evening, we were treated to a teaser trailer this week featuring some well-known – if slightly more mature -faces of the characters we fell in love with all those years ago.
This highly anticipated short is sure to have people across the UK tuning in this evening for a fantastic cause. One thing’s for sure – what the world really needs now is love, actually.
