If you look for it, I’ve got a sneaky feeling you’ll find that love for Love Actually is all around. This is especially true around the holiday season, when the movie is played on repeat. The 2003 film directed and written by Richard Curtis —who also penned rom-coms like Four Weddings and a Funeral , Notting Hill and Bridget Jones’s Diary —follows a series of interwoven love stories.
While some of the plots are romantic and involve couples, others explore different forms of love. These include familial love, like the bond between siblings and the connection between a young boy and his newly widowed stepfather, as well as the love between friends, such as a rock star and his longtime manager. “There are so many different relationships in the film, and what’s nice about it is that Richard’s tried to examine love at many, many different angles—not just romantic love, and not just sexual love and lust but also love between brothers and sisters and love that’s attached to negative emotions, like guilt and anger and all that,” cast member Emma Thompson told E! back in 2003.
“And I think that’s exactly right. We’ve only got one word to describe a plethora of different emotions, and it’s not adequate by any means.” Thompson is among the many big names featured in the star-studded film, with others including Hugh Grant , Keira Knightley , Colin Firth , Liam Neeson , Bill Nighy , Martin Freeman , Andrew Lincoln , Chiwetel Ejiofor and the late Alan Rickma.
