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Well, thanks, Keira and Hugh. You’ve really killed the Christmas spirit in my house – with a little help from Paddington Bear.
It’s been 21 years since the two of you combined in your only film together – along with Liam Neeson, Alan Rickman, Laura Linney, Bill Nighy and Emma Thompson – to conjure the most loved Christmas movie of the 21st century.
Hugh Grant in the movie Heretic and Keira Knightley in Black Doves.
Who can forget Hugh Grant dancing at Number 10 to the Pointer Sisters singing Jump (For My Love)? Or delivering what has been called the best speech ever delivered by a British prime minister to a bullying US president about “the special relationship”? (Pity it was fictional.)
As for Keira Knightley, she claims never to have rewatched the nauseating scene in which the best man at her wedding, played by Andrew Lincoln, declares his love for her in a series of cue cards (“To me, you are perfect”) but she knows millions of people watch the Richard Curtis movie each December.
Still, even if Love Actually has as many loathers as lovers, why did Keira and Hugh have to do this? Surely Christmas movies and TV offerings should follow a simple formula? Girl initially hates boy, comes to appreciate he’s not that bad, shares a few intimate jokes, nearly ends the blossoming relationship over a misunderstanding and ultimately realises he’s the one as Mariah Carey warbles a lush ballad?
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Instead, Knightley and Grant’s screen offerings this holiday could be marketed as Mass Murder, Actually.
Knightley stars in a Netflix series, Black Doves, set in London before Christmas. She plays a traitorous assassin ordered by a mysterious spy organisation to marry a rising Tory politician (and delivers his twins). That’s deep cover!
In the first episode, the lover with whom she was planning to escape is shot in a political kill and she goes rogue, determined to wreak havoc. She calls in a friend and hitman, played by Ben Whishaw, the award-winning Shakespearian actor best known to the younger generation as the voice of a certain marmalade-loving bear. (This apparently confused Knightley’s real-life kids who couldn’t understand why he didn’t resemble a stuffed toy when she told them her new co-star was Paddington.)