Love Actually's Director Admitted The Movie Doesn't Hold Up Today

For a lot of movie lovers, it’s impossible to imagine the holiday season without an annual rewatch of Love Actually. The cozy Christmastime rom-com has been a staple for families and friend groups for the past two decades, but for its director, a lot of the film just doesn’t hold up today. Richard Curtis revealed parts of the movie’s humor don’t sit well with him anymore.

In particular, Curtis regrets all the jokes about weight in Love Actually. In one of the film’s storylines, the young political staffer Natalie is constantly mocked for her body size by multiple characters. Looking back, Curtis admitted he was “behind the curve” when writing those jokes, which he concluded “aren’t funny any longer.”

“I remember how shocked I was like five years ago when [my daughter] Scarlett said to me, ‘You can never use the word ‘fat’ again,” Curtis said during a recent interview at the Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, per Today. “And wow, you were right.”

“I think I was behind the curve, and those jokes aren’t funny any longer,” he continued. “I don’t feel I was malicious at the time, but I think I was unobservant and not as clever as I should have been.”

Curtis also discussed the lack of racial diversity in Love Actually, which is an issue that has also been called out in his other rom-coms Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary.

“I think because I came from a very un-diverse school and a bunch of university friends,” Curtis said. “With Notting Hill, I think that I hung on to the diversity issue, to the feeling that I wouldn’t know how to write those parts. And I think I was just sort of stupid and wrong about that.”

The recent remarks echo a statement Curtis made in Love Actually’s 20th anniversary ABC special last year. “There are things you’d change but, thank God, society is changing, so my film is bound, in some moments, to feel out of date,” he said at the time.