Okay, imagine you've just been elected British Prime Minister… how do you celebrate this
once-in-a-lifetime victory?
The answer is simple: You absolutely must dance to The Pointer Sisters' 1984 hit "Jump
(For My Love)," just like Hugh Grant's character in the 2003 comedy Love Actually.
This isn't up for debate… and you're going to love it.
But actually, Grant didn't particularly love filming that particular scene.
Not even a little bit.
And in the new BBC documentary Hugh Grant: A Life On Screen, he reveals exactly what
he thought about the proposed dance scene when he first heard about it.
Take it away, Hugh Grant:
"'That's going to be excruciating,' and it has the power to be the most excruciating
scene ever committed to celluloid."
He goes on to reveal,
"I certainly dreaded filming it and [director Richard Curtis] kept saying, 'Don't you think
we'd better rehearse the dancing scene' and I'd say, 'Uh yes I've just gotta learn some
lines... my ankle hurts today.'
So it was never rehearsed."
In the documentary, Grant describes his predicament like this:
"Imagine, you're a grumpy 40-year-old Englishman, it's seven in the morning, you're stone-cold
sober and it's like, 'Okay Hugh if you'd just like to freak out now.'
It was absolute hell."
Think he's joking?
He's not.
Director Richard Curtis even confirms the story:
"He hated the dance scene."
Curtis goes on to say:
"We left it to the final day but as always he'd actually really rehearsed and had three
or four little jokes up his sleeve and [he] turned out, from his dirty behavior in discos
across London, to be quite good at dancing."
At the time, Hugh Grant wasn't exactly shy about expressing his displeasure about the
scene: In fact, it sounds like pretty much everyone on set knew he was dreading his mandatory
twerk-out.
In the same BBC documentary, actor Colin Firth says:
"I do remember him making a terrible fuss about the dance."
And much like the rest of us, Firth sounds pleased that Grant ultimately came around
and gave the dance his all.
Firth even admits,
"I think it's the highlight of the film for a lot of people."
So why did Hugh Grant hate the idea of the scene so much?
As he explained to People in January 2018:
"Well, I could see that it might work, but I never understood it technically."
He goes on to reveal,
"I kept saying to Richard, 'Okay look, I got the radio on in my bedroom and I'm dancing,
fine, but then I start to dance through the whole 10 Downing Street.
Where's the music coming from and how does it cut off at the end?"
According to Grant, Curtis just replied,
"Oh, don't worry about it, it's just a film world."
Meanwhile, Curtis says Grant's apprehensions evaporated once he actually started dancing...
although his performance proved rather problematic from an editing standpoint.
Curtis says Grant wasn't just dancing in the scene he also ended up singing to the music,
karaoke style.
In 2017, the director told The Daily Beast:
"[Grant] didn't like the song it was originally a Jackson 5 song, but we couldn't get it so
he was hugely unhappy about it.
We didn't shoot it until the final day and it went so well that when we edited it, it
had gone too well, and he was singing along with the words.
When you edit a dance sequence like that, it's going to be a third of the length, and
the bit he's singing the words to isn't going to be the bit of that moment, so it was incredibly
hard to edit."
It sounds like Grant has come to ultimately appreciate the scene.
In a 2018 interview with People, he acknowledged that:
"People do like it.
I'm proud of the fact I did it without any stimulants."
These days, it seems like everyone fondly remembers Hugh Grant's bold booty-shake.
Unsurprisingly, that scene was spoofed in Love Actually's 15-minute, so-called sequel...
which aired as a Red Nose Day charity special in 2017.
How did Richard Curtis manage to write such a thing?
As he explained to The New York Times:
"I tried to think about what was the most memorable thing in each story [... like] Hugh
Grant as the prime minister doing a dodgy dance and giving a speech [...]."
In the mini-sequel, Grant dances to Drake's "Hotline Bling" but with considerably less
grace this time around.
In fact, he ends up rolling down the stairs and evidently hurts himself in the process.
Hey, that's what you get for turning your back on The Pointer Sisters.
"How many times have I told you not to dance down the stairs?"
"Once or twice, once or twice."
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