Love Actually star Mia looks completely different and had interesting 20 year career after movie

Since her devilish role as Mia in Love Actually, Heike Makatsch has gone on to build a varied career in film and TV and as you'd expect, looks completely different after 22 years.

The German actor, 54, plays a stylish and flirtatious employee at a London design agency alongside Harry, played by the late Alan Rickman.

Despite loyalties to his wife Karen (Emma Thompson), Mia pursues Harry through subtle gestures and crossing professional boundaries.

Throughout the film, Harry doesn't reject Mia and, instead, allows for the affair to unfold.

The turning point comes when it appears that Harry buys an expensive gold necklace for Karen, who later learns that it was a Christmas gift for another woman - Mia.

While we never see the actual affair take place, Love Actually fans know exactly what is happening.

Mia from Love Actually obviously looks different after 20 years (Universal Pictures)

After receiving a Joni Mitchell CD, Karen eventually confronts her husband who admits what he'd been doing.

Surprisingly, the couple stay together despite their marriage not appearing to be a happy one.

"Outside of Germany, people only know me through Love Actually or at least primarily through that film," Makatsch told the Metro last year.

"That’s where people see me as the secretary who destroys a marriage, and many women feel a sort of anger towards me because of that.

Love Actually fans hated Mia for being the other woman (Universal Pictures)

"It’s quick that you’re typecast and I hope that now internationally Carlotta will help me so that people can see I’m not just the marriage-destroying evil Mia."

Since playing the almost home-wrecker (since they stayed together), Makatsch has appeared in a succession of big movies, including sci-fi/horror franchise Resident Evil in 2002, portraying Dr Lisa Addison, a scientist caught up in the zombie outbreak.

She also delivered a striking performance as Liesel’s mother in the adaptation of the bestselling novel The Book Thief in 2013, playing the role of a mother in war-time Germany. That same year, she was in Back on Track, a German tragicomedy.

Heike Makatsch has gone on to have a successful career on film and TV (Gisela Schober/Getty Images)

In recent years, she starred as Carlotta Klatt in Where’s Wanda? in 2024, an Apple TV+ crime-comedy series about desperate parents investigating their daughter’s disappearance.

In 2025, she is also credited in the German adaptation Call My Agent Berlin (2025).

Away from acting, Makatsch was in a seven year relationship with James Bond star Daniel Craig, which ended in 2004.

She has been in a relationship with actor Trystan Pütter since around 2017, and had her third child with him. Her first two children were with musician Max Martin Schröder.