This Is The Love Actually Scene Hugh Grant Hated Filming
How do you celebrate an election victory? By dancing to The Pointer Sisters' "Jump (For My Love)," like Hugh Grant as the incoming British Prime Minister did in Love Actually, of course.
But Grant was less than enthusiastic about the scene, at least at first. In a new BBC documentary, Hugh Grant: A Life On Screen, Grant says, "There was this dance written and I thought, 'That's going to be excruciating' and it has the power to be the most excruciating scene ever committed to celluloid. I certainly dreaded filming it and Richard [Curtis, the director] kept saying, 'Don't you think we'd better rehearse the dancing scene' and I'd say, 'Uh yes I've just gotta learn some lines... my ankle hurts today.' So it was never rehearsed" (via HuffPost UK).
It doesn't stop there, as Grant adds, "Imagine, you're a grumpy 40-year-old Englishman, it's seven in the morning, you're stone-cold sober and it's like, 'Okay Hugh if you'd just like to freak out now.' It was absolute hell."
Everyone knew Hugh Grant wasn't excited about his dance scene
In case you thought Grant was joking, movie director Richard Curtis confirmed: "He hated the dance scene... We left it to the final day but as always he'd actually really rehearsed and had three or four little jokes up his sleeve and it turned out, from his dirty behavior in discos across London, to be quite good at dancing."
It seems Hugh Grant was so vocal about disliking the scene that everyone around him knew how he felt. In the same BBC special honoring Hugh Grant, fellow actor Colin Firth, who plays writer Jamie (he's the one who ended up finding love with his Portuguese housekeeper, Aurelia), says, "I do remember him making a terrible fuss about the dance." But Firth (just like the rest of us), is grateful that Grant managed to rise above his apprehensions. "I think it's the highlight of the film for a lot of people" (via SheKnows).
In the end, Hugh Grant was actually proud of the scene
Hugh Grant explained to People what it was about the scene he didn't like. He said, "I never understood it technically. I kept saying to Richard [Curtis, the director] 'Okay look, I got the radio on in my bedroom and I'm dancing fine but then I start to dance through the whole 10 Downing Street. Where's the music coming from and how does it cut off at the end?" Grant says Curtis' explanation was to say, "Oh, don't worry about it, it's just a film world."
But Curtis says Grant's apprehensions over the dance scene seemed to evaporate once he got started, and it proved to be problematic from an editing standpoint. Curtis reveals that Grant wasn't just dancing — he also ended up singing to the music, karaoke-style. The director recalls, "...he [Grant] didn't like the song — it was originally a Jackson 5 song, but we couldn't get it — so he was hugely unhappy about it. We didn't shoot it until the final day and it went so well that when we edited it, it had gone too well, and he was singing along with the words. When you edit a dance sequence like that, it's going to be a third of the length, and the bit he's singing the words to isn't going to be the bit of that moment, so it was incredibly hard to edit" (via the Daily Beast).
In the end, Grant admits, "People do like it. I'm proud of the fact I did it without any stimulants."
The dance scene turned out to be one of Love Actually's most iconic moments
In the end, Hugh Grant's booty shake ended up being so iconic that it was one of the scenes that made into Love Actually's 15-minute charity sequel which aired as a Red Nose Day charity special in 2017. Richard Curtis tells The New York Times he began writing the sequel by wondering where the characters would be more than a decade after the original.
Curtis explained, "I tried to think about what was the most memorable thing in each story. I was sure that Bill Nighy's Billy Mack would still be punting dodgy records in outrageous interviews; I most remembered Colin Firth and Lucia Moniz in the car, neither able to speak the other's language; Hugh Grant as the prime minister doing a dodgy dance and giving a speech; Rowan Atkinson wrapping something..."
So the dodgy dance was reprised in the sequel, and Grant showed off his moves to Drake's "Hotline Bling" this time, but with considerably less grace as he ends up rolling down the stairs and hurting himself in the process.