The Notting Hill cast were pelted with eggs by shopkeepers whilst filming

Notting Hill was as delightful to make as it is for fans to watch, Hugh Bonneville tells Yahoo UK, but there is one moment that sticks out in the actor's memory for being quite unexpected — being pelted with eggs by a shopkeeper.

Now being hit with eggs doesn't sound like it would be a fun experience, but Bonneville reminisces about the surprising turn of events with fondness when he looks back at the iconic rom-com for his Role Recall interview. The film follows the love story between an English bookseller (Hugh Grant) and a Hollywood star (Julia Roberts), and to Bonneville the event perfectly encapsulated what the making the movie was like for the cast: absolute joy.

"It was a very happy time," he recalls. "I can remember every day of it with real, vivid clarity because it was a happy experience having a a group of people led by Duncan Kenworthy, the producer, and Richard Curtis, who wrote this glorious script, and Roger Michell who was such a wonderful director.

"I think I've got one particular memory, a scene that's not even in the film, of all of us walking down Portobello, six of us abreast —the group of friends— and I remember there was a shopkeeper who started throwing eggs at us.

"They'd all been paid hassle money for the having their trade interrupted for a few hours while we filmed, nevertheless this shopkeeper thought it would be hilarious to throw eggs. He wasn't cross, he just thought it might be entertaining, but that's sort of the character of Notting Hill as a place."

Read more: Hugh Grant imagines heartbreak scenario for his Notting Hill character (Yahoo entertainment)

Notting Hill was one of Bonneville's first big breaks, he played the mild-mannered Bernie, a friend of Grant's Will Thacker who had a knack for saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, especially to Roberts' starlet Anna Scott.

Looking back at what it was like to film, Bonneville goes on: "From a filmmaking point of view, after each take Roger would come up to each of us and give us a note or an idea about how we were delivering the lines or the rhythm of the scene, and he did it with such individual attention so that the way he'd give a note to me would be completely different to the way that Gina McKee would take a note, or Tim McInnerny, or Hugh Grant.

"He just had this great capacity as a director, having come from the theatre, of knowing how to pull the faders up and down on each performance, and that was a great thing to observe, and it was a very happy shoot."

The film was released when Curtis was at the height of his fame as one of British cinema's great writers, having previously worked on Four Weddings and a Funeral, Blackadder and The Vicar of Dibley. He went on to continue this success by writing Bridget Jones' Diary, and he wrote and directed Love Actually.

Read more: Four Weddings and a Funeral at 30: 'We didn't pander to American tastes' (Yahoo Entertainment)

Bonneville, who also made a guest appearance in The Vicar of Dibley, talks fondly of Curtis, sharing: "What makes his films stand out is that he likes people, and I think, certainly in those iconic films, he writes about the fragility of love and the passage towards love with great wit and dexterity, and sometimes a sort of naughty rudeness but in a very charming way.

"So they are wish-fulling films, and there's no nothing wrong with that. He is an annoyingly nice bloke and he gets the best out of people by exuding warmth himself, it's hard not to like him."

Notting Hill is available to rent and buy digitally, and our full Role Recall interview with Hugh Bonneville is out now.