The “fantastic” 1984 movie Hugh Grant was banned from starring in: “I wasn’t allowed”
After making his feature-length debut in 1982’s Privileged, the first film ever released by the Oxford Film Foundation, Hugh Grant was absent from the big screen for another five years.
When he returned, he seemed intent on making up for the lost time, seeing as he appeared in six movies that premiered between September 1987 and October 1988. It was an all-or-nothing beginning to his theatrical career, but in between those two points, he was barred from starring in another one.
Not just any old picture, either, but one that would have sent him to the other side of the world to shoot in several glamorous locations in a big-budget studio flick that would have seen him sharing an ensemble cast with some big names of Hollywood’s past, present, and future.
Grant was still in his early 20s when the cameras started rolling on the production that was ripped out of his hands, but it did teach him an important lesson that he was forced to learn quickly so that he could begin working his way up the acting ladder in earnest, and in a way, it was his own fault.
There’s a reason why everyone in every walk of life should always check the small print, and even though he’d been hired to play a part in a grandiose historical epic, the only roadblock happened to be the biggest: Roger Donaldson’s The Bounty was shooting in French Polynesia and New Zealand, but since he wasn’t a member of an actor’s union, he wasn’t allowed to go.
“I was cast in The Bounty with Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins; fantastic, six weeks in Tahiti,” Grant reminisced. “And I had my costumes made, I looked lovely, I was very excited, I was 23 years old, and then they said, ‘Oh, actually, there’s a bit of a problem, because you’re not a member of Equity.'”
A spanner had been thrown into the works, and after patiently biding his time, he discovered that it wouldn’t be removed. “It all went to some tribunal, and in the end, on the eve I was supposed to fly to Tahiti, I wasn’t allowed to do it,” the star explained. “So that did make me quite cross.”
If he’d bothered to get his Equity card, Grant could have been starring alongside Hopkins, Gibson, Daniel Day-Lewis, Liam Neeson, Bernard Hill, Laurence Olivier, and, randomly, Neil Morrisey, in The Bounty, but the sliver of a silver lining that was he went out and got one almost as soon as he’d been officially barred from boarding the titular ship.
Given his reputation for being a handful, it would have been interesting to see how he’d have gotten on, with the film suffering from a notoriously troubled shoot that saw Donaldson and Hopkins constantly at loggerheads, while Gibson was spending most of his free time getting into barroom brawls.
