Love Actually Child Star Brands the Film ‘S–t’

It is a classic Christmas staple in many households — and it’s also “s–t”, according to one of its child stars.

Lulu Popplewell has slammed “Love Actually” as sexist, 17 years after she appeared in the star-studded romcom.

The now 29-year-old played Alan Rickman and Emma Thompson’s characters’ daughter Daisy, who famously played the lobster in her school nativity play at the film’s climax.

“I don’t regret it at all,” she said while appearing as a guest on the Almost Famous with Barnaby Slater podcast. “Look, softly be it spoken I think it’s a s–t film. I think it’s aged badly.”

“All the women in it are sort of passive objects. I think that there was an article that described them as passive objects to be acquired, and on re-watching it’s not great.”

The article she was referring to may have been this infamously scathing 2013 retrospective by Jezebel, which hilariously tore asunder each one of the film’s many problematic-but-delightfully-glossed intertwining storylines, from romanticizing sexual harassment, to Colin Firth’s human trafficking, to Andrew Lincoln’s sadistic attempts to steal his best friend’s wife.

However Lulu, who is now a comedian, defended the film’s director Richard Curtis: “You also have to remember that he was writing in the context of the time,” she said.

“I mean I don’t know how he excuses more recent bits of work. But it was what it was in 2003 or whenever it was out.”

She said that while the film was “not for me because I don’t like cheese” she added that she was still glad people like it. “You’re allowed to. But you have terrible taste.”

Lulu — whose older sister Anna is also an actress, who played Lucy Pevensie in the Chronicles of Narnia films — was still a pre-teen when she made the movie, and thus could not even watch the R-rated comedy when it was released.

“It had nipples and everything,” she recalled. “We didn’t even get to watch it at the premiere. We walked down the red carpet and then got taken to dinner at Planet Hollywood.”