Richard Curtis Has Actually Written Notting Hill 2… But It’s Not A Film

Universal Pictures

Notting Hill 2 exists… but it doesn’t look like we’ll be seeing it any time soon.

The apparent sequel to the much loved 1996 romcom has actually been written for years, but not as a feature length film.

Speaking on the Have You Seen? podcast, director Richard Curtis said that he wrote the 10 minute follow up for Comic Relief years ago… and he even shared the plot too.

“I was going to do it for Comic Relief,” he said. “I wrote Notting Hill 2, which was going to be a 10-minute special set in the divorce lawyer’s office with Hugh and Julia splitting up, and then they both realised they loved each other again.”

That’s pretty much how we expected that relationship to go, yeah.

Notting Hill follows A-list actor Roberts who meets bumbling bookshop keeper Grant during a quite literal meet-cute when he spills his orange juice all over her.

They’ve met, and it was cute. Let the romance commence.

Universal Pictures

If you haven’t yet seen the film (it is a classic, c’mon), it details Grant’s attempt to woo Roberts with his normie life until she eventually decides that it’s him she wants to be with after all.

It’s all very lovely… Until it ends in almost-divorce in the sequel, seemingly.

On the pod Curtis also spoke about some of his other projects over the years, most notably Love, Actually and the plethora of outdated body shaming jokes that appear in it.

In the film, Martine McCutcheon’s character is repeatedly called ‘fat’ by others, a trend that was quite prominent at the time when it came to women who weren’t size 0.

“In my generation, calling someone ‘chubby'[…] there are endless jokes about that,” he said.

“I think I was behind the curve and those jokes aren’t any longer funny. I don’t feel I was malicious at the time but I feel I was unobservant and not as clever as I should have been.”

• Notting Hill
• richard curtis