Richard Curtis often happens upon something he has written – or directed, or produced – while he’s flipping through TV channels. “I’m still hoping I’ll convince my wife to watch one episode of Blackadder,” says the screenwriter behind Four Weddings and a Funeral and Bridget Jones’s Diary, who wrote the 1980s Rowan Atkinson comedy with Ben Elton. “That would be enough. You would have thought that, in 30 years, she’d find half an hour to watch an episode. If she just managed that.”
For Curtis, whose first TV credits date back to the BBC sketch show Not the Nine O’Clock News, stumbling across Love Actually, which he wrote and directed, or Mr Bean, which he created with Atkinson, is a discombobulating business.
“Sometimes I’ll watch a little bit of an episode or a film, but it’s a long time since I’ve sat down and watched the whole of them, because when you watch them they’re like really expensive diaries. I’ll remember he behaved very badly that day or we argued a lot about the cost before we lost the light. It’s a very meta experience.”
Curtis’s latest joint is That Christmas, an animated feature based on That Christmas and Other Stories, his book of children’s tales. The project brings him together with a voice cast that includes Brian Cox, Fiona Shaw and Bill Nighy, as well as Ed Sheeran, who provides an original song called Under the Tree.
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“It was lovely to be able to expand the original books, because all of the stories needed expanding,” Curtis says. “I think two of them ended, like, on Christmas Night. That was fun for me. I’ve never done that before: I’ve never taken one of my films and then said, ‘Oh, what happens in the next two months?’ I enjoyed that process. It wasn’t reducing what I had written.”
“Richard loves to talk about Christmas,” says Simon Otto, the film’s director. “How it’s not just for really big Christmas lovers. And it’s not just for sparkle and the beautiful shop windows. Or even the cosiness of the whole season. It’s because when we finally have time to spend with our loved ones, we inevitably show our human flaws during that intense time of hanging out together. So Christmas is the perfect setting for a lovely domestic drama when nothing happens as expected, isn’t it?”
I consider myself unbelievably lucky. I’m still lucky. I’ve had a wonderful experience on That Christmas. One of the things I really like is working with a completely new bunch of people and a completely new thing
So assorted livewire kids have adventures with turkeys; Bernadette attempts to reboot the nativity play; Danny pines for his classmate Sam; Sam, in turn, frets that her naughtier twin, Charlie, will fail to impress Santa Claus – who (voiced by Cox) must contend with a blizzard and a case of mistaken identity. Various happy outcomes bring the entire town to the beach for a freezing festive dip.
“In our village, for the past 25 years or so, we have that swim on Christmas morning,” Curtis says. “And then a whole bunch of us have a communal lunch in the barn. It was fun for me to do something which is about the kind of Christmases I have now rather than the ones when I was a desperate actor in London.”
Danny, the young hero of That Christmas, who finds himself alone when his hard-working mother has an emergency hospital shift over the holidays, is the character the writer feels closest to.
“I had a different kind of childhood,” says Curtis, who was born in New Zealand and lived in Australia, Singapore and the Philippines as well as England when he was growing up, “but when I’m watching the film I keep thinking about how I felt when I was first sent to boarding school – that feeling of just being completely exposed and on your own and with none of your support structures around you.”
Curtis was already hugely successful when, in the mid-1990s, Four Weddings and a Funeral catapulted him and Hugh Grant, the film’s leading man, into awards season. Shot in six weeks for less than £3 million, it for a time became the highest-grossing British film in history, taking almost €250 million at the box office and earning two Oscar nominations, for best picture and best original screenplay. (Curtis’s script lost to Quentin Tarantino’s for Pulp Fiction on the night.) Notting Hill, his 1999 follow-up, starred Julia Roberts, then Hollywood’s biggest woman star.
“We had a bit of paper where they had predicted how much Four Weddings was going to make in every territory,” Curtis says. “And the number listed for the USA was $0. I consider myself unbelievably lucky. I’m still lucky. I’ve had a wonderful experience on That Christmas. One of the things I really like is working with a completely new bunch of people and a completely new thing.
“But actually, in the rest of my career, almost all my films have been made with Working Title,” he says, referring to the production company that established itself in cinema with My Beautiful Laundrette, in 1985. “What has been lovely is the consistency of the people I’ve worked with and how they’ve protected me when I wanted to do something different – like the multistory thing of Love Actually was a pretty risky idea at its time.”
Love Actually ultimately turned out to be problematic in a different way. In one of its best-known sequences, a mooning Andrew Lincoln turns up on his best friend’s doorstep to tell the latter’s wife (Keira Knightley), via a series of cue cards, that he loves her. Curtis was surprised when, about a decade ago, an interviewer asked him about that “stalker scene”.
It was a first step towards a broader reckoning. In 2021, at Cheltenham Literature Festival, Curtis’s daughter Scarlett, a writer and activist, interrogated the writer of Love Actually, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Four Weddings and Funeral about his depiction of women, inappropriate boss behaviour – yes, Grant’s Love Actually PM – use of fat jokes, and lack of onscreen diversity.
“I’m used to my work now becoming something in the past,” Curtis says. “You don’t feel too guilty or worried about the way you behaved at school, you know? Blackadder is so old. I’m completely happy to look at Love Actually as it changes ... I don’t take any criticism of it personally. It’s a fun house I built in a different country at a different time.”
Curtis has, nonetheless, taken his daughter’s criticisms on board. Yesterday, his jaunty jukebox comedy set in a world in which The Beatles never existed, was headlined by Himesh Patel. That Christmas, similarly, features a very multicultural voice cast.
For Curtis, it’s an opportunity. “There is such a huge range of talent out there,” he says. “Lolly Adefope, who plays Mrs McNutt, is a friend of my daughter’s. She’s really funny. Sindhu Vee, who plays Mrs Mulji, is really funny. It has been fantastic to take advantage of the full range of British talent.”
These days, Curtis says, he is most often complimented on About Time, his time-travelling romcom, in which Nighy’s father and Domhnall Gleeson’s son attempt to engineer romantic and family life by tampering with domestic history.
“One of the things that’s very sweet for me is that I used to be Domhnall, but now I’m Bill,” Curtis says. “It’s the one most people approach me about, that. I think it may be because it’s a less famous film and they think I will have been spoken to about it less. My daughter is 29 years old, and she says she’s never been on a date with a sensitive young man who doesn’t say that About Time is his favourite.”
That Christmas is streaming on Netflix
