As “Love Actually” season begins, let’s not forget about its (almost) lesbian storyline

This year marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Love Actually, director Richard Curtis’s star-studded, cloyingly sentimental 2003 holiday rom-com.

While reviews of the film at the time of its release were decidedly mixed-to-negative, and many aspects of its various intersecting storylines have aged poorly in the two decades since, it has nonetheless become an undeniable Christmas classic, a problematic fave that many fans across the country will undoubtedly be queueing up as soon as the Thanksgiving dishes are done.

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Centered on the romantic foibles of a sprawling cast of characters primarily in London during the holiday season, Love Actually, it must be said, is aggressively white and straight. Among what feels like dozens of main characters, there are only a few people of color (future Oscar nominee Chiwetel Ejiofor is more or less relegated to a side character in Kira Knightly and Andrew Lincoln’s glancingly underdeveloped story), and not one character identifies as LGBTQ+.

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Curtis himself has admitted that the film’s lack of diversity is a problem. “There are things that you would change, but thank God society is changing,” he said last year in an ABC special about Love Actually. “My film is bound in some moments to feel out of date. The lack of diversity makes me feel uncomfortable and a bit stupid.”

But that didn’t have to be the case. According to this 2021 video essay, the original cut of the film was over three hours long, and Curtis ended up cutting scenes from each of its storylines to get it down to a more manageable length. As the director explained in a bonus feature discussing the deleted scenes on the DVD release of the film, one particular cut led to the excision of what would have been Love Actually’s only queer storyline.

The film’s original version featured a story involving Emma Thomas’s character Karen’s difficult relationship with her surly young son. In one cut scene, she’s called in to see the boy’s headmistress, played by Anne Reid, to discuss an essay he’s written. With Reid’s character’s introduction and context removed, her entire story also got the axe.

“The idea was meant to be that you just casually met this very sort of stern headmistress,” Curtis explained. “And the idea was meant to be that later on in the film, 15 minutes later, 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.”

A later scene would have seen Reid’s character arriving home and interacting with her partner, played by the magnificent Frances de la Tour, who is dying of cancer. Then, towards the end of the film, we would have discovered that de la Tour’s character has died when Karen offers her condolences to Reid at the big climactic school Christmas pageant.

“We had a lovely scene,” de la Tour said of Love Actually in an interview with The Independent last year. “And I think it was the only gay scene. 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?”

For his part, Curtis said in the film’s bonus content that he was “really sorry to lose” Reid and de la Tour’s storyline.