“Love Actually” Director Admits Film's Weight Jokes Are No 'Longer Funny': 'I Was Behind the Curve'

"I don’t feel I was malicious at the time, but I think I was unobservant and not as clever as I should have been," said Richard Curtis

Richard Curtis is reflecting on the body-size comments in Love Actually.

As the 2003 British holiday classic nears its 20th anniversary, the movie's writer-director, 66, is addressing the commentary on female protagonists' bodies in the film and others he wrote, including Bridget Jones's Diary (2001).

In Love Actually, Natalie (Martine McCutcheon) — who plays the love interest of Hugh Grant's prime minister, David — is referred to by multiple characters in terms of her weight, including her dad calling her "plumpy," a colleague saying she has "huge thighs" and even Grant's character joking, "God, you weigh a lot" after she jumps into his arms at the airport.

“I remember how shocked I was like five years ago when Scarlett said to me, ‘You can never use the word 'fat' again,' " Curtis recently said during a conversation with his daughter, writer and activist Scarlett Curtis, at the Times and Sunday Times Cheltenham Literature Festival, per Today.

“And wow, you were right,” he told Scarlett, 28, directly. “I think I was 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 clever as I should have been.”

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Related: The Stars of 'Love Actually', Then & Now

Love Actually follows several stories and stars, alongside Grant and McCutcheon, an ensemble cast of Emma Thompson, Laura Linney, Bill Nighy, Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Olivia Olson, Alan Rickman, Andrew Lincoln, Keira Knightley, Colin Firth, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Rodrigo Santoro, Lúcia Moniz, Martin Freeman, Kris Marshall, Joanna Page, Heike Makatsch, Abdul Salis, Gregor Fisher and Liam Neeson.

Related: 18 Things You Never Knew About 'Love Actually'

Speaking with Diane Sawyer for the ABC News special The Laughter & Secrets of Love Actually: 20 Years Later back in November 2022, Curtis said he felt "uncomfortable and a bit stupid" about the movie's "lack of diversity" almost 20 years later.

"There are things you'd change but, thank God, society is changing, so my film is bound, in some moments, to feel out of date," he said.

And while Curtis lamented not having more diversity in the film, he said in its DVD bonus footage that he was "really sorry to lose" one storyline that had been filmed but didn't make it into the final cut. It followed the school headmistress, played by Anne Reid, who was in a lesbian relationship with a terminally ill woman, played by Frances de la Tour.

"The idea was meant to be that you just casually met this very stern headmistress ... [but] later on in the film, [we] suddenly fell in with [her] and you realize that no matter how unlikely it seems, any character that you come across in life has their own complicated tale of love," he said.

Another brief scene that was cut was shot in Kenya and involved a man and a woman living in Africa "who have faced famine and come out of the ordeal together and united," Grazia reported in 2020.

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