It's Love, Actually

Let me set the scene for you. I was probably around age 6, spending the weekend with my Grandma in December. I stayed with her every other weekend and we’d always watch a film before bed. As it was nearly Christmas, my Grandma recommended that we watch a Christmas movie, even though it was I hadn’t heard of. She said it wasn’t animated, so I instantly felt grown up to be watching a film with real people in it. We started watching it, and I was enjoying it, and then BOOM. There he is. A small, ginger boy with a cute face who is called Sam. Hello, first celebrity crush.

After that, every time we watched Love Actually I was made fun of because – clearly – my not-so-subtle crush was very obvious! Not so long later, I watched Nanny McPhee for the first time and there he was again! I couldn’t escape this celebrity crush. He was no longer “Sam”, he was “Simon” and that’s when I first started paying attention to his name. Every film I watched I wanted to know whether or not he was in it. My first celeb crush, Mr Thomas Brodie-Sangster

Time passed and the crush died down, and it only hit me again when Love Actually became an annual watch in my household. It’s not Christmas without Love Actually, and it’s not Love Actually without Thomas Brodie-Sangster. He also appeared in a few episodes of Doctor Who, and DON’T get me started on the fact I only just recently discovered he was the voice of Ferb from Phineas and Ferb. That blew my mind.

But that isn’t the only thing that blew my mind. When I became old enough to learn how to Google things, I discovered something that broke my heart. At 6 years old I assumed Thomas was the same age as me, he looked so small in Love Actually that how could he be any older than me? I was wrong. He was thirteen in Love Actually, and by the time I was 10 and my crush was still ongoing, he was twenty years old. He was a whole ten years older than me – my dreams of marrying him were OVER!

Again, time went on, and even though I was 14 years old and gained many other celebrity crushes, I was still teased when Love Actually came on TV. For my birthday, Nowhere Boy was one of my gifts; a film about The Beatles in which Thomas Brodie-Sangster played Paul McCartney. Then, the trailer for The Maze Runner was released, and my celebrity crush hit the roof. I was just as obsessed as 6-year-old me was, but this time Thomas was no longer a cute boy, he was a tough looking man, even if his small frame hadn’t really changed.

I bought The Maze Runner books straight after I watched the first film at the cinema, and I pictured Thomas as Newt in every single book. It was also at age 14 that I discovered Wattpad, and you know what every 14-year-old girl used to do back in 2012-2016 when they had a celebrity crush? They wrote fanfiction. Me being included in those girls.

I began writing a “Thomas Brodie-Sangster Imagines” ‘book’ at the start of 2014 and I didn’t finish writing different ‘imagines’ until the end of 2016. In that time, and even since then as I haven’t deleted my work, my writing about my celebrity crush has gained over 200K reads. I wrote 26 in total, and I even get people read them now!

My celebrity crush on Thomas Brodie-Sangster and my want to envision him in my life accidentally kick-started my passion for writing and I used to love writing about how Thomas would fall in love with Y/N (or more commonly known as Your/Name). It’s so cheesy to think about now! Since 2016, my celebrity crush has faded but I don’t think that it’s any coincidence that my first celebrity crush was on a small, ginger boy, and now my current relationship is with a cute ginger guy. So thank you Thomas Brodie-Sangster for setting my standards at the young age of six, and I’ll always remember my crush on you as “Sam” because you know… it’s love, actually.