Kristin Scott Thomas has admitted she did not laugh when she first saw Four Weddings and a Funeral. The actor said she watched the film alone in an empty cinema in Paris and came away convinced that nobody would understand it.
That is a sharp reversal for a movie now regarded as one of the defining comedies of the 90s, and one that helped lift Scott Thomas, Hugh Grant and writer Richard Curtis. She played Fiona in the film, which follows a group of friends across the series of titular events, but at the time her reaction was the opposite of the warm reception it later found. “I thought, ‘nobody’s going to understand this at all’,” she said.
She said the solitude of that first viewing shaped her response. “I remember going to see that film all by myself, they gave me a screening in Paris, and I sat there all by myself in this empty cinema. I thought, ‘this isn’t funny at all, nobody’s going to understand this at all’,” Scott Thomas said. She described herself as “Polly Pessimist” among her friends, and said that watching films in a cinema matters because audience reactions spread quickly through the room.
That is also why her memory of Four Weddings and a Funeral has stayed with her. The film is now seen as one of the best comedies of its era, but her first encounter with it was so flat that she expected it to disappear without a trace. The gap between that private response and the public life the film went on to have is the point of the story: a comedy that seemed dead in an empty Paris cinema ended up becoming part of the decade’s film culture.
The timing of her remarks is tied to the release of My Mother's Wedding, the film she directs, co-writes and co-stars in. It is in UK and Ireland cinemas now, and she describes it as “a comedy about a tragedy” about three sisters who return home for their twice-widowed mother’s third wedding. James Fleet, Scarlett Johansson, Sienna Miller and Freida Pinto also star, and Scott Thomas says: “It’s a wedding, there’s a family disaster – what’s not to love?”
Her next move is already set. From October, Scott Thomas will star as Lyubov Ranevskaya in a new production of The Cherry Orchard at London’s Harold Pinter Theatre, a role she has called “like coming home to a piece of theatre that is endlessly alive.” For now, though, her latest interview has given Four Weddings and a Funeral a fresh, and unexpectedly unsentimental, afterlife.
