luvvie actually!
Remoaners. eco bores. Ocean-going pseuds. as a sequel is made, why the cast of the romcom love actually is the most achingly right-on ever assembled . . .
A SHORT sequel to the 2003 movie Love Actually reunites cast members including Hugh Grant and Colin Firth for Red Nose Day this Friday. But have there ever been so many bleeding-heart luvvies in one movie? Seeing as they’ve given so many opinions on subjects from the environment and poverty to Brexit, the film should have been called Luvvie Actually. CHRISTOPHER HART runs his Luvvie-O-Meter over the cast . . .
EMMA THOMPSON
SUReLy the uberluvvie of our age? She played a stayat-home mother in Love Actually, but in real life has an estimated net worth of £30 million and lives in a £4million house in her beloved leafy Hampstead — the third highestincome borough in Britain.
yet in a TV interview, she hilariously called her North London home turf ‘suburban...very ordinary’. She changed her tune two years ago, however, when she campaigned against a new Tesco express store opening in nearby Belsize Park, which she described as ‘a villagey area’.
More seriously, she said that Britain had failed to take in thousands of refugees from Calais because of ‘racism’. ‘We’ve got plenty of room for them,’ she argued.
She also said the UK’s response to the refugee crisis in europe was ‘shaming’.
On Brexit she said: ‘I feel european, even though I live in Great Britain — and Scotland as well.’ (yes, emma is a secondhome owner.)
emma also held forth on refugees while standing on the red carpet at the Berlin Film Festival, dressed to the nines and swathed in a white faux fur stole. Priceless!
Oh, and she has described Ukip’s Nigel Farage as a ‘white nationalist’.
So the more than 50 per cent of Britain’s Sikhs who voted Leave...they’re just confused, are they, aligning themselves politically with a ‘white nationalist’?
Finally, there is emma’s delicious ‘humble-bragging’ about her daughter Gaia, who is named after a Greek deity. Miss Thompson got a role in one recent film, she explained, because Gaia was sitting next to ‘Robert Redford — whom I adore — at the Golden Globes’. So that’s how it works!
LUVVIE RATING: 10/10
HUGH GRANT
AMONG the many fashionable causes espoused by luvviedom (though you may have missed it), one fine example is . . . Belarus.
In 2014, Hugh Grant — who played a dashing prime minister in Love Actually — added his name to yet another of those famously self-important ‘open letters’ by luvvies, apparently demanding the attention of the world.
It called upon ice hockey players not to go to Belarus to play in the World Ice Hockey Championships, because to do so would be to support ‘europe’s last dictator’, Belarus’s strongman president, Alexander Lukashenko.
Among other repressive measures, Lukashenko has been accused of muzzling a free Press. By odd coincidence, Hugh Grant would like to restrict Press freedom as well, through the Hacked Off pressure group. Now that’s funny!
Inevitably, he is a staunch Remainer and said recently: ‘If I had to put money on it I would be surprised if we Brexit. Don’t forget, the referendum was only an advisory; it was not a compelling thing.
‘I think might be fudged, especially it now that people are starting to realise quite what a selfwound it was.’
Grant has also publicly lamented: ‘As much as I adore myself, I’m quite keen to find someone else to care about more.’ A difficult task, given that he holds himself in such extraordinarily high regard.
LUVVIE RATING: 8/10
BILL NIGHY
NIGHy, who played ageing rock ’n’ roll legend Billy Mack in Love Actually, wears his political colours on his sleeve: ‘I vote Labour, obviously. Well, look around you — where else are you going to go?’ He’s taken roles in typically luvvie films such as Pride, about lesbians and gay men backing the miners’ strike in the eighties.
He’s appeared in short films such as The Banker, written by his old friend Richard Curtis — director of Love Actually — which argued for a ‘Robin Hood tax’ on financial transactions to help fight poverty in the Third World. The campaign — started by Richard Curtis himself —
turns out to be a cabal of multi-millionaire actors, scriptwriters and assorted luvvies demanding the poor be helped by levying higher taxation on bankers. But if banks are subjected to new taxes, as night follows day they will pass on the costs to us, the customers. In the past, when the wealthy wanted to help the poor, they spent their money lavishly, founding schools, hospitals, libraries and social housing trusts. Our Left-leaning, very well-heeled celebs now show they care for the deprived by...demanding higher taxation. How generous! Nighy also featured in a BBC drama written by Curtis called The Girl In The Cafe, which seemed to be driven by a Leftie agenda. He played a civil servant who falls in love with a woman he then takes along to a G8 summit, only to discover she is an activist who confronts the PM on Third World debt. Inevitably, in Curtis-world, he is spellbound by her arguments and tries to help her end world poverty. LUVVIE RATING: 7/10
MARTIN FREEMAN
FreeMaN chose to display his Left-wing credentials by appearing in a memorable broadcast in support of ed Miliband’s joke of a Labour Party. He was seen intoning the words: ‘Now I don’t know about you, but my values are about community, compassion, decency — that’s how I was brought up.’ Which wasn’t so much ‘virtuesignalling’ as ‘virtue-declaring’. He droned on: ‘Labour, they start from the right place. Community, compassion, fairness — all the best things about this country ‘I love this country so much and I love the people in it, and I think you do, too. But really, for me, there’s only one choice. and I choose Labour.’ Freeman’s then partner, the Sherlock actress amanda abbington, weighed in by tweeting: ‘F*** the Tories.’ None of this stopped ed Miliband being humiliated at the ballot box. (But Miliband was positively centrist compared with arthur Scargill’s farLeft Socialist Labour Party, for whom Freeman voted in 2001.) Keen to advance his luvvie credentials, Freeman says that seeing Mrs Thatcher in power settled his political opinions. ‘There were goodies and baddies, and she made things much clearer for me.’ and here is the very essence of Leftie-liberal politics. It doesn’t mean you simply have different views from those who are more conservative; it means you are a Good Person, and they are Bad. Whether Freeman was a good or bad person when it came to his family finances was a moot point when it emerged that amanda abbington was facing a tax demand of £120,000 from HMrC.
Instead of some of Freeman’s reported £10million fortune being used to pay off her bill, abbington was declared bankrupt.
Since all their major assets were in his name — and, therefore, out of reach of the taxman — the exchequer was being denied a sixfigure sum. Only later was the bankruptcy exposed in the Press and the debt paid off.
LUVVIE RATING: 8/10
MARCUS BRIGSTOCKE
THe TV comedian — who played a radio DJ in the original film — is favoured by the BBC for his liberal views. and he likes to give the impression he knows all about love, actually, too.
He gushed in an interview: ‘My most precious weekends are those spent at my home in Wandsworth, South London...hanging out with my wife Sophie and our children alfie and emily.’
But a month later it was reported that he’d been having an affair for a year — with former emmerdale actress Hayley Tamaddon.
Brigstocke is a busy man in lots of ways. He’s a leading member of Cape Farewell, a campaign group that says it offers ‘a cultural response to climate change’ — a favourite hobby horse of the luvvie classes.
It goes on to clarify: ‘We use the notion of expedition — arctic, island, urban and conceptual — to interrogate the scientific, social and economic realities that lead to climate disruption.’ Clear?
To this noble end, Brigstocke joined one of these costly, dieselslurping, CO2-belching expeditions to Svalbard, in the Norwegian arctic, to look at the melting ice caps. Unfortunately the expedition couldn’t get all the way there, because . . . there was too much ice! LUVVIE RATING: 6/10
RICHARD CURTIS
THe director of Love actually has a long history of campaigning for causes close to his heart. But it doesn’t always end well.
He persuaded actress Gillian anderson and footballers Peter Crouch and David Ginola to take part in a four-minute film called No Pressure, for the 10:10 environmental campaign, which is backed by the poverty charity action aid.
In the film, for which crew and cast worked for free, environmental campaigners blow up members of the public.
People who saw it thought it was tasteless and unnecessarily violent, and it was rapidly pulled from distribution, with apologies all round.
Here’s another prize vignette of Curtis: a visitor to the office where he writes was once alarmed to see the humorist collapsed over his desk, head in his hands, as if suffering from a particularly dreadful migraine. ‘What’s wrong with richard?’ she asked anxiously.
‘Well, you see, the thing is,’ came the answer, ‘richard’s very worried about africa.’
Whether this vast continent knows Curtis is worried about it, or cares, whether it needs him to be worried, whether the one billion people of africa are incapable of surviving without richard Curtis, these are questions beyond my power to answer.
He seemed to suggest recently that Brexit and Donald Trump’s election inspired him to make this Love actually sequel. Because things ‘feel strained’ and ‘complicated’ at the moment, he felt it was the right time to ask whether ‘love’ was still ‘all around us’.
So, if richard Curtis demonstrates one thing, it’s that it isn’t just actors who are luvvies.
If you hang out with them enough, and have several million in the bank, and lie awake at night worrying about africa . . . then you can become one, too!
LUVVIE RATING: 10/10