Céline Dion plays herself in the new romcom Love Again, and she shares many scenes with the movie’s stars, Priyanka Chopra Jonas and Sam Heughan. But don’t ask them what it was like working with the legendary diva — they actually never met.

Entertainment Weekly reports that amazingly, Céline filmed her parts separately from Priyanka and Sam and then they were edited together seamlessly. Why? Blame COVID: The movie was filmed in 2020.

“We shot during the pandemic, and it was obviously very difficult for people to travel at the time, so we did shoot a lot of it on sound stages and on green screen,” Sam tells EW. 

He adds, “We were in our own bubble in the U.K., and Céline was in Canada. It was difficult, but I think they did some great magic in the movie, and I think those scenes really worked out.”

Love Again, in theaters Friday, is about a woman who keeps texting her late fiancé’s cellphone number, which is then reassigned to a journalist. By reading her texts, he falls in love with her, but doesn’t know how to approach her — until he’s assigned to profile Céline and she becomes his love adviser.

Priyanka says having Céline in the film, no matter how they did it, was all worth it. “She’s so amazing. She’s funny, she’s self-aware, it’s really cheeky,” she says. 

Sam adds, “Her music is about romance, it’s about love, and she believes in it 100 percent. The message behind her music is so important. And then she even imparts some of her own personal experience [about her late husband, René Angélil] during the movie, and tells her own love story, and it’s certainly very moving.”

 

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