WRONG ACTUALLY

‘Love Actually’ Director: I Was ‘Stupid’ About Diversity

Richard Curtis says he regrets his lily-white casting—and fat jokes about female characters.

The director of Love Actually, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones’s Diary said the criticism he got for his lily-white casting is deserved, chalking it up to coming from “a very un-diverse school” and “the feeling that I wouldn’t know how to write those [diverse] parts.” Speaking at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Richard Curtis added that he thinks “I was just sort of stupid and wrong about that.” He also expressed regret for including fat jokes about women in his movies: “I think I was behind, you know, behind the curve, and those jokes aren’t any longer funny, so I don’t feel I was malicious at the time, but I think I was unobservant and not as, you know, as clever as I should have been.”