Bill Nighy: There's a HUGE appetite to make a full-length Love Actually 2 (exclusive)

We may yet get a full-length sequel to ‘Love Actually’, says one of its many stars Bill Nighy.

The cast and crew of Richard Curtis’ ‘Love Actually’ recently reconvened to shoot a 10-minute mini-sequel – ‘Red Nose Day Actually’ – in aid of Comic Relief, but Nighy admits there’s a big desire to make a full-length sequel in the future.

“There is a huge appetite [to make ‘Love Actually 2’],” Nighy told Yahoo Movies.

“It’s entirely, obviously, down to Richard Curtis and quite understandably. I don’t know, I haven’t discussed it a great deal with him but it would be such an enormous undertaking.”

Famed rom-com writer Richard Curtis made his directorial debut with ‘Love Actually’ in 2003, with romantic anthology filmed packed to the rafters with A-list stars, many of whom returned for the charity sequel. Reassembling a cast that includes Colin Firth, Hugh Grant, Bill Nighy, Keira Knightley, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Liam Neeson, Emma Thompson and Andrew Lincoln for a feature film would require more complex scheduling than an ‘Avengers’ movie.

Nighy, who won a BAFTA for playing ageing rocker Billy Mack in the original, admits living up to the first one also would be a near-impossible task.

“[‘Love Actually’] has entered the language in a way that very few films do. It’s sort of beloved. To make a sequel… it was hard enough making the first one. For [Richard Curtis] to do 10 stories and interlock them, make them dovetail in that sweet way, and to have it be that successful was an enormous achievement in the first place. To do it twice? That’s a tall order. But I don’t know what he’s thinking.

“Always there would be an enormous amount of enthusiasm for that idea obviously from the people, because people could make a lot of money [from it].”

‘Love Actually’ made around £200m at the global box office against a £30m budget, making perhaps even more on the DVD release. It’s a television staple over the festive period with many stations playing it on hard rotation.

‘Their Finest’ is coming to cinemas on 21 April.

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