After all this time, Richard Curtis is big enough to admit that this scene feels completely weird and even acknowledges that people now feel like Mark is basically stalking Juliet. What he does want to say, though, is that it was never intended to be as creepy as it later felt, and it didn’t seem that strange at the time.
“All I can say is that a lot of intelligent people were involved in the film at the time, and we didn’t think it was a stalker scene,” Curtis said. “But if it’s interesting or funny for different reasons 1702213503 then, you know, God bless our progressive world.”
This isn’t the first scene from “Love Actually” that Curtis has re-evaluated as of late. While speaking to his daughter Scarlett Harris — a writer and activist — during a literature festival in England, Curtis admitted that some of the film’s body-shaming is completely regrettable. Specifically, the character Natalie (Martine McCutcheon) is frequently referred to as fat. Not only is Natalie a beautiful and normal-sized human woman, but this kind of language is never appropriate, particularly from in-universe staffers who work alongside her for the Prime Minister of England, David (Hugh Grant). “I think I was behind, you know, behind the curve, and those jokes aren’t any longer funny, so I don’t feel I was malicious at the time, but I think I was unobservant and not as, you know, as clever as I should have been,” Curtis told his daughter and the audience.
