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'Love Actually' Originally Featured A Lesbian Storyline That Was Cut
This tragic queer love story got left on the cutting room floor and we have some feelings about that.
Queer scenes getting cut from films is, unfortunately, nothing new to any LGBTQ+ lover of cinema. But every time a new round of Love Actually fans find out that the polarizing Christmas rom-com is among the many films that wound up booting queer scenes from the final cut, there’s a level of shock all the same.
For all the many interwoven stories featured in Love Actually, every character is shown as or assumed to be straight. But that wasn’t actually meant to be the case.
Anne Reid initially played a headmistress connected to the family of Emma Thompson’s character, and who was dealing with the terminal illness of her partner, played by Frances de la Tour.
“The idea was meant to be that you just met this sort of stern headmistress,” director Richard Curtis said when introducing the deleted scenes on the DVD. “And the idea was meant to be that later on in the film…we suddenly fell in with the headmistress, and 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.”
The scenes wound up getting cut because the scene with Thompson that would have introduced Reid’s character also got cut, so there was no real way in for the headmistress and her tragic relationship.
De la Tour addressed this in an interview last year, calling it a “lovely scene” and expressing her appreciation for Curtis at least giving her a heads-up that it didn’t make the final film.
“I think it was the only gay scene,” she told The Independent. “It’s odd that they cut it. Maybe it was too dark to bring into it. Because it ended up being quite a light and fluffy film, didn’t it?”
Those who enjoy Love Actually would probably argue that it did. And considering the lesbian relationship actually wound up with de la Tour’s character dying, and Reid ending up alone, some fervent rewatchers of the film might prefer that storyline staying on the cutting room floor anyway.
We guess you can't "bury your gays" if you don't include them at all...
For those curious, you can check it out below:
Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.
Rachel Kiley is presumably a writer and definitely not a terminator. She can usually be found crying over queerbaiting in the Pitch Perfect franchise or on Twitter, if not both.
