It’s arguably definitely the most romantic moment in the movie Love Actually.
Jamie Bennett (played by Colin Firth) proposes to Aurélia, the Portuguese maid he’s fallen for, in the restaurant where she works as a waitress. She (adorably) accepts, by telling him, “yes is being my answer” and everyone applauds.
Then… THEN Colin does something that still to this day – 16 long years later – makes me feel just a little bit funny.
He places his left hand on Aurélia’s neck, gently brushes her lower lip with his right thumb, pulls her towards him and kisses her. It is… spectacular. But the moment wasn’t all that it seemed.
While Colin’s execution of that kiss was downright delicious, he can’t take full credit.
The kiss was actually “designed” by writer/director Richard Curtis’ longtime partner and collaborator, Emma Freud.
Speaking with journalist and author Dolly Alderton on her Love Stories podcast last year, she said: “Richard had asked me to be the ‘kissing’ consultant for the film. We really needed that kiss to be amazing. Colin and I had a lot of chats and we designed a kiss with my signature move in it.”
The signature move of course being the gentle brush of the thumb.
That thumb, though.
Freud, who has been with Curtis for 28 years, also revealed in the podcast that she was so sick of the movie after months of editing it, that she ‘wanted to vomit on it.’
“We saw the film a thousand times while making it,” she said. “You see the film so often that you literally want to puke on it by the time you actually open.”
She went on to reveal that after the premiere, and entire decade passed before she watched the movie again.
Speaking of other mind-blowing production revelations… these are the people Dawson’s Creek was about.
