Few films get rewatched as often as the best Christmas movies, and one modern classic of the genre is the ensemble romance Love Actually. The movie is full of beautiful and heartbreaking stories, but at least one story of the film, while it had been confirmed by the filmmakers, had never been verified by the man who played the key role, Rowan Atkinson.
It’s been a long-held theory among fans of Love Actually that Rowan Atkinson’s character was more than just a man, but actually a supernatural force, a Christmas angel, who appears in the story in order to specifically influence events. In a recent appearance on BBC Two (via LADBible), Atkinson himself confirmed that was how his character was originally written, but also argued that just because the movie is missing the revelation of this fact, it doesn’t make it not true in the final cut. The actor said…
Well, actually, I mean, in theory, [being a Christmas angel] is still his role when my character is doing the wrapping in Selfridge’s of the gift.
Atkinson appears twice in Love Actually. First, he plays a man at a department store taking an obscenely long time to wrap a box for Alan Rickman’s character, who is contemplating an affair. Later, he’s a man at the airport who assists Thomas Brodie-Sangster’s Sam in confessing his love to his school crush.
Love Actually’s script editor Emma Freud had already revealed the original plan that Atkinson’s character was originally written to be a Christmas angel, one who intentionally took forever to wrap a Christmas gift, specifically because he wanted to prevent Rickman’s character from buying it. However, Atkinson had not spoken about this before.
I like the idea that, while the Christmas Angel reveal might have been removed from the story, there’s no reason that fans can’t simply accept it as the truth anyway. Atkinson seems to feel that his character was still an angel, whether the movie says so or not.
One of the reasons that Love Actually has probably been so successful as a Christmas movie that has stood the test of time is that there’s so much about the movie for people to talk about. While it’s a romantic movie, not every story has a happy ending. There are numerous questions left unanswered by the text, which leads to fans debating what happened. Though not everybody seems to really get what happens in the movie. There’s also the fact that some elements of Love Actually may not have aged so well.