Director and screenwriter Richard Curtis earned well-deserved backlash after he poured out a bucket of mea culpas about his films after a scolding from his woke daughter.

The successful writer-director seemed to put distance between himself and his romantic comedy classics like “Love Actually” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” even though fans of his movies beg to differ on his take on the humor.

Speaking at the Times and Sunday Times’ Cheltenham Literature Festival, Curtis verbalized his regret about the fat jokes and lack of diversity in the wildly popular films, responding to a public scolding by his 28-year-old daughter Scarlett, according to Daily Mail.

“In the last few years, there has been a growing criticism from a lot of people about the ways your films in particular treated women,” she told her 66-year-old dad, though one wonders where this criticism has been voiced. “There were multiple accounts of inappropriate boss behaviour in Love Actually… in general the women are visions of unattainable loveliness.”

“I wish I’d been ahead of the curve,” Curtis reportedly replied.

“I think because I came from a very undiverse school and bunch of university friends, I think that I hung on to the feeling that I wouldn’t know how to write those parts. I think I was just stupid and wrong about that. I felt as though me, my casting director, my producers just didn’t look outwards,” he added.

Speaking specifically on the fat-shaming his daughter accused him of, Curtis said, “I remember how shocked I was five years ago when Scarlett said to me, ‘You can never use the word ‘fat’ again.’ Wow, you were right. In my generation calling someone chubby [was funny] — in Love Actually there were jokes about that.”

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

Curtis told ABC’s Diane Sawyer last year that he felt “uncomfortable and a bit stupid” about the “lack of diversity” in the 2003 “Love Actually” which starred Martine McCutcheon and Hugh Grant.

But fans of the films blasted Curtis for caving to the woke crowd’s criticisms, as British journalist Liz Jones raked him over the coals for “self-flagellating on stage” and “sounding like a whipped schoolboy” in response to his daughter’s comments.

“It’s staggering that a man of intelligence and talent can be made to swiftly abandon works of art that the rest of us so deeply relate to, use to self-medicate, or simply find so funny that tea snorts out of our nostrils as we watch them,” Jones wrote in an op-ed published by Daily Mail Tuesday.

“It felt as though Scarlett had brought on to the Cheltenham stage a giant-sized eraser and begun to rub out the faces of characters we love more than we love ourselves — and that’s no overstatement,” she added.

Jones notes how Scarlett “entirely misses the point” in her bashing of the iconic films’ characters, like Bridget Jones (played by Renée Zellweger) who “feels that she is flawed, unlovable.”

“It’s her vulnerability, her striving to be better via self-help books, dieting, gym membership and blue string soup that makes her so relatable,” Jones pointed out. “As someone who has been on a diet from the age of 11, I don’t find Bridget’s hatred of her own body triggering or enabling. I find her reassuring. I think: I’ve been there. I do that. I’m no longer alone.”

“We Bridget fans know she wasn’t real, we’re not dim — we know Renee Zellweger had to wear prosthetic breasts and pile on pounds to play the lovable singleton. But we also understand Richard Curtis (and the original creator, Helen Fielding) were not mocking her,” Jones explained.

The journalist went on to note that, contrary to the current woke trend, most women “don’t buy into the body positive movement” and that “Bridget is so beloved by women precisely because she makes mistakes.”

“I’m going to sum up Richard Curtis’s oeuvre: women who have wobbly bits can snare Colin Firth,” Jones concluded, referring to the actor who played Bridget’s love interest, Mark Darcy. “And I say, hurrah! Yes, they come with a touch of fantasy, but are hugely reassuring in a world that isn’t always fantastic. Richard — your films have been a raft in a storm. You weren’t stupid or wrong. You were a life-saver.”

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Frieda Powers

Senior Staff Writer
Frieda@bizpacreview.com

Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.

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