Red Nose Day’s ‘Love Actually’ Reunion Special Was Packed With Fun Callbacks

It’s been more than a decade since Love Actually hit theaters and charmed audiences with Hugh Grant’s dancing, Liam Neeson mentoring a small child in matters of love, and Colin Firth learning how to speak a foreign language so he could get laid. Since its debut the movie has become a Christmas staple, bringing families together on a yearly basis in the same way its characters come together in the movie. While the messages and feelings of the movie are everlasting, some moments that were topical in the early-2000’s have been updated to better represent how people might be feeling in the present day.

Hugh Grant, who played the British Prime Minister in the movie and is back in that position in the reunion special, once again gives an inspirational speech to a room full of people. But this time, the message might resonate in a bit of a different way due to current events. A person in the crowd asks him,

“When you became Prime Minister the first time, you were very optimistic. You said that the power of good would finally win, that love actually was all around. Fourteen years later, do you still feel as upbeat?”

Grant’s Prime Minister offers up a similarly inspirational, if not quite as happy, answer to the question.

“Obviously, times for many people have grown harder and people are nervous and fearful. And it’s not just in politics that things are tough. Usain Bolt has run his last Olympics, the Harry Potter films are finished, Piers Morgan is still alive.”

While the Piers Morgan dig may be cynical (but hilarious) it’s good to see the brief reunion offer up some form of perspective about the present day rather than just being a standard rehashing of the movie’s bubbly demeanor.

It wasn’t all gloom and doom though. The cue cards were back! Which, isn’t that really all anyone cared about when this thing was announced? The world really needed more footage to make more cue card memes!

Suffice to say, fans were more than satisfied with the final product.

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https://twitter.com/_sshenouda/status/867927219330584576

https://twitter.com/BreeJess/status/867926704316190721

We’ll see everybody back here for another reunion in 13 years, right?