There were many stories that played out in Love Actually. Some of them weren’t completely scripted so actors got to improvise. January Jones is one of those actors and this is how she helped create her funny scene.
January Jones played Jeannie in ‘Love Actually’
Colin (Kris Marshall) isn’t hitting it off with English women so he decides to go to America to try his luck with women there in Love Actually. We see him land in Milwaukee, Wisconsin and decide to immediately go to a bar.
He sits down and orders a drink and quickly gets noticed by Stacey (Ivana Miličević) because of his accent. Her friends Jeannie (Jones), Carol-Anne (Elisha Cuthbert), and Harriet (Shannon Elizabeth) join them.
Jeannie has the idea to invite him back to their place. She says they all sleep in the same bed so he’ll have to sleep with them in it in the nude. The whole story is pretty cartoonish.
Jones wrote half of her lines
Script editor, Emma Freud revealed many details about Love Actually on Twitter. Freud revealed that some things were cut out of the movie.
“In the original edit sam did amazing parcour [sic] all through the airport when he ran to find his girlfriend. #LoveActually,” she tweeted. The editor revealed why it didn’t make it into the movie with, “yes but we cut that bit – storyline was fun but too contrived.”
Freud also claimed Jones wrote half of her lines. “She was sooooo funny when we filmed that scene,” Freud tweeted. Cuthbert talked about improvising in this scene with VH1.
“I do remember, though, on set, it was just a lot of fun and it was such a creative space and we were allowed to improvise and try different things and it wasn’t just completely set into Richard’s writing,” Cuthbert said. “I mean we were allowed to sort of venture, at least in the scenes that we got to play with, January Jones, myself, the other girls. It was nice that we got to sort of play around. ”
There was another scene that was improvised
A memorable scene in the movie was David (Hugh Grant) celebrating after standing up to the President of the United States in a press conference by dancing. We hear “Jump (For My Love)” by 10 Downing Street to the Pointer Sisters as the Prime Minister dances before getting caught by his secretary.
Grant wasn’t happy about it, and claimed it was improvised. “I thought, ‘That’s going to be excruciating, and it has the power to be the most excruciating scene ever committed to celluloid,’” Grant said in the documentary, Hugh Grant: A Life On Screen, according to Cinema Blend. However, the director claimed the actor did rehearse for it.
It sounds like actors were allowed to try new things on the spot. A lot of Jones’ work made it into the final cut.
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