Love Actually Originally Featured a Lesbian Storyline

Now that Thanksgiving has passed and we’re just about to hit December, it’s perfectly fine to dust off your old Love Actually DVD (or stream it on Amazon) and dive into one of the best ensemble rom-coms in all of history. While the 2003 comedy has received plenty of backlash in recent years, some of us (SOME OF US) still get a tiny pitter-patter in our hearts when Olivia Olson belts out her timeless rendition of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas.”

Even the biggest Love Actually fan may not have been aware of a certain deleted scene from the film which features a lesbian couple. According to Buzzfeed via EW, one of the original storylines featured a relationship between two women — a stern headmistress played by Anne Reid and her terminally ill partner, played by Frances de la Tour. The clip is included as bonus material on the DVD. “The idea was meant to be that you just casually met this very sort of stern headmistress,” Writer-director Richard Curtis says in the vid. “Later on in the film, we suddenly fell in with the headmistress and you realize however unlikely it seems, that any character you come across in life has their own complicated tale of love.”

It is unfortunate the scene was deleted, since all relationships depicted in the film (aside from the bromance between the aging rocker and his manager) feature straight couples. I know we’re all generally against reboots, but maybe in this case it wouldn’t be such a bad idea.