The story of how Hugh Grant revolted Sandra Bullock: “I didn’t hear from her for three years”
With his days as a romantic lead well in the rear-view mirror, Hugh Grant has been settling into a new era of his career, one that might be the most entertaining yet based entirely on how apathetic he continues to be in a public setting.
The actor has always had a reputation for being a tricky customer on occasion, with many a red-carpet interview or talk show appearance being torpedoed by his complete and utter lack of interest, which in turn has given rise to the curious theory that he’s spent decades being a dick on purpose for his own amusement.
Admittedly, there could be some weight to it when his disdain for playing an Oompa Loompa gained global traction. Yet his constant air of misery has coincided with a number of performances where he appears to be having more fun than he’s had in years.
Hamming it up in the aforementioned Wonka, Guy Ritchie’s The Gentleman, Jerry Seinfeld’s Unfrosted, family favourite Paddington 2, and fantasy blockbuster Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves has seen him embrace that mischievous side, even if it did once cause Sandra Bullock to ignore him for years.
At the height of his rom-com phase, Grant was drafted in to star opposite Bullock in 2002’s Two Weeks Notice, which arrived on either side of Bridget Jones’ Diary and About a Boy, so his star was flying very high at the time. However, they’d first met a long time before that, and it didn’t quite go to plan.
“We’d been dying to do something for ages, filmmaking-wise that is,” he admitted to the BBC. “I had been watching Sandy for years and thinking, ‘That’s the girl I should be doing films with.'” Studios clearly agreed and ended up putting them in the same room together for a powwow, where Grant almost instantly put his foot in it.
“We first met up about five years ago and had what Hollywood calls a ‘relationship meeting’, where you talk about the possibility of working together,” he explained. “I told Sandy a very disgusting story, which I think revolted her. She left the room, and I didn’t hear from her for three years after that.”
Sadly, more details were not forthcoming, but it must have been something completely and irredeemably horrendous for Bullock to not only abandon their first-time encounter midway through, but keep herself as far away from Grant as possible for years. She got over it eventually, though, which worked out very well for both parties.
Writer and director Marc Lawrence’s Two Weeks Notice may not have brought anything new to the rom-com table, but that didn’t matter in the slightest when it came within a whisker of clearing $200million at the global box office, with Bullock putting her disgust to one side in the name of commercial success.
