Why Hugh Grant Really Didn’t Want To Do That Famous Love Actually Dance Scene

In the interview, Richard Curtis says that Hugh Grant was, “hugely grumpy about it,” and I’d like to point out that Daily Beast uses all caps for the word “hugely.” Curtis explains that Grant “was so wanting his bit not to be fake,” which is completely understandable. That said, isn’t it better when you know that the people in authority over a country can at least dance down the stairs every once in a while? When Curtis asked him to be “a bit sweeter” or “do it a bit more charming,” Grant thought he was being tricked. Curtis says:

“I told him, ‘I’m going to mainly be giving you a very magisterial point of view, but I just want to make you a bit sweeter once in a while.’ The fault line was the dance, because there was no way he could do that in a prime ministerial manner. 

“He kept on putting it off, and he 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.”

Look, it’s a catchy tune, and for just a moment, you can block all the weird fat jokes from that storyline out of your head and just enjoy Grant being a giant goofball. Grant really did hate it, though. He recently told Diane Sawyer on the upcoming ABC special “The Laughter & Secrets of Love Actually: 20 Years Later” (via Deadline), “I saw it in the script and I thought, ‘Well, I’ll hate doing that.”