[Times, parody article] Love Actually reunion: what the characters did next — Two decades after the film’s release, the cast reunite — but what of David, Natalie and co, asks Stuart Heritage
[Times, parody article] Love Actually reunion: what the characters did next — Two decades after the film’s release, the cast reunite — but what of David, Natalie and co, asks Stuart Heritage
1 comment
Love Actually has never enjoyed consistent praise. The film was a box office success on its release in 2003 (it made its production budget back six times over), but its reputation hit a bumpy patch ten years ago when critics started to pen retrospectives with titles such as “Love Actually is the least romantic film of all time”. Now it seems as if we’ve pushed through all that. Next week ABC will broadcast The Laughter & Secrets of Love Actually: 20 Years Later — A Diane Sawyer Special, a Friends-style cast reunion show featuring most of the actors in the film.
**David (Hugh Grant)**
Although wildly popular in 2003, the former prime minister now leads a very different life. He lasted in office for another five years, only to be forced to resign after responding to the 2008 financial crisis by giving a long, sentimental speech about how much he loves watching people hug.
In the decade and a half since leaving office David has earned millions of pounds by making lucrative speeches then hiding his earnings in an impenetrable labyrinth of offshore shell companies. He sometimes attempts to intervene on political matters — he really didn’t get along with Jeremy Corbyn — and is lobbying Netflix after it was reported that he would be played by Colin Firth in a forthcoming season of The Crown.
**Natalie (Martine McCutcheon)**
She became globally famous when her romance with the prime minister was made public. Natalie and David quickly became inseparable, and before long they were married. However, subsequent media coverage of official foreign trips often focused on Natalie over David, which led to feelings of resentment on his part.
Within five years they were divorced, but Natalie refused to sink back into anonymity. She is a panellist on Loose Women (she recently made headlines for calling Jeremy Hunt “a right twat” on air), and can be found on Instagram, where she regularly posts sponsored content about mid-price saucepans.
**Juliet and Peter (Keira Knightley and Chiwetel Ejiofor)**
You will be pleased to learn that Juliet and Peter had a very happy marriage. Happy, but not long. This is because . . .
**Mark (Andrew Lincoln)**
Mark, or, as he has come to be known, the Cue Card Killer, is one of the UK’s most notorious serial murderers. He is incarcerated, serving several consecutive life sentences, including for the murder of his first known victims, a couple named Juliet and Peter. The pair were discovered with their throats slashed in early 2004, the crime scene investigators focusing on the giant card reading “TO ME, YOU ARE PERFECT” left next to the bodies as a potential clue.
The murders were followed by a spate of others, each marked by handwritten cue cards. The victims were another young woman (“IF I CAN’T HAVE YOU, NOBODY WILL”), a retired primary school teacher (“MY WASTED HEART HAS ALWAYS LOVED YOU, MRS POTTERSBY”) and a long-haired man who had recently been shopping at a nearby Tesco Express (“I WILL ADORE YOU FOR EVER, PRETTY WOMAN WHO I HAVE ONLY BRIEFLY SEEN FROM BEHIND IN A SUPERMARKET QUEUE”). Mark was eventually caught during a sting operation at his local branch of Hobbycraft, where he was stocking up on supplies.
**Jamie and Aurelia (Colin Firth and Lúcia Moniz)**
For 13 beautiful years Jamie and Aurelia enjoyed a fairytale romance. They briefly courted, using the scraps of each other’s language that they had managed to learn, and quickly got married. Before long they were both fluent: in English, in Portuguese, and in the language of love.
Aurelia gave up her childhood home and moved to London with Jamie, and they could genuinely call themselves a perfectly happy couple. Then Brexit happened, Aurelia discovered that Jamie had voted Leave, and she immediately packed her things. His last words to her, shouted through the window of a taxi departing for Heathrow, were: “You lost, get over it.”
**Billy Mack (Bill Nighy)**
MeToo’d, sadly.
**Karen (Emma Thompson)**
After the harrowing Christmas Eve mix-up when she discovered the depths of her husband’s infidelity, Karen decided to leave for good. Striking out on her own was scary, but she quickly came to cherish her support network of female friends who buoyed her and helped her to regain her self-respect. She started her own business, a female-orientated start-up, to help other divorced women, and it became an international success. She now has an MBE, and a small army of women who owe her everything. She is married to the actor Greg Wise, which everyone agrees was a big step up for her.
**Harry (Alan Rickman)**
When Karen left him Harry found himself free to finally make a serious go of it with his secretary. Sure, there was a big age difference. Sure, the entire relationship was founded on a highly problematic power dynamic. But somehow they made it work. They now live in total bliss, surrounded by their multitude of smiling children. The moral of the story is that getting off with your secretary is brilliant, and everyone should do it.
**Daniel (Liam Neeson)**
After helping his stepson to find happiness in the wake of his mother’s death, Daniel should have been able to sit back and relax. Unfortunately, this was not his destiny.
On New Year’s Eve Daniel received a phonecall from a sinister group of human traffickers. They had his stepson, he was told, and he wouldn’t be returned unless Daniel paid them a large sum of money. What the traffickers didn’t realise is that Daniel had a very particular set of skills, acquired over a very long career, that made him a nightmare for people like them. And so began a trail of bloodthirsty pan-European violence that would last for three increasingly bad movies.