The actor became famous at 13 in Richard Curtis’s yuletide romance. Now 32, he talks about playing Malcolm McLaren, the success of The Queen’s Gambit and coming to terms with not playing Ron Weasley
The night before I meet Thomas Brodie-Sangster, a friend reads his Wikipedia page to me in horror. “He’s 32!” she says. “He can’t be!” The waitress in the cafe where we meet in central London makes a similar noise when she clocks Brodie-Sangster, noting that he has barely changed since he hit the big time in 2003. When he was in his mid-20s, bars were still refusing to serve him unless he showed ID. In 2019, a viral tweet highlighted how young he looked, with an image of him alongside Keira Knightley, who is just five years older.
That film that catapulted the baby-faced actor to fame in the early 00s was, of course, Love Actually, Richard Curtis’s unapologetically schmaltzy yuletide romance. Brodie-Sangster played Sam, who learns to play the drums to impress the classmate he has a crush on, alongside the likes of Hugh Grant, Emma Thompson and Colin Firth. Brodie-Sangster was 13 at the time. Does it annoy him to still be labelled “the Love Actually kid”? He shakes his head. “If I got annoyed about it every time, I’d spend a lot of my life that way,” he says. “It’s something I’m really proud of. It’s cool to be in a film that’s somehow still gaining momentum. It did quite well but it wasn’t a huge blockbuster. But over the years it’s gained that cult following.” He watched it for the first time this year since the premiere, and says it was “pretty good, brilliant writing,” before adding with a laugh: “And great acting all round.”
