Hugh Grant names the “most excruciating scene” of his career
Perhaps one of the slickest characters cinema has ever seen, Hugh Grant has delivered many memorable moments in his time. Whilst he might be best known for his period of being typecast as a bumbling but good-natured heartthrob from the upper-middle class, the Londoner has been trying his best to move away from this area in recent times.
This attempt at a shift has seen Grant play notorious Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe in the 2018 series A Very British Scandal, the duplicitous private detective Fletcher in Guy Ritchie’s 2019 action caper The Gentlemen, and the murderous oncologist Jonathan Fraser in the hit HBO miniseries, The Undoing. More recently, Grant starred as the rogue con artist Forge Fitzwilliam in Dungeons and Dragons: Honour Among Thieves, adding another comedic aspect to his extensive oeuvre.
When appearing on The Late Late Show alongside his Dungeons and Dragons co-stars in March 2022, Grant revealed the reasons behind his metamorphosis. He announced that he would “happily shred” his CV because he “specialised in being bad for decades”.
A harsh account of his past efforts, there’s no wonder he has changed tact so dramatically as of late. Grant said: “I would happily shred my IMDB page, my CV, because I specialised in being bad for decades, really. I got better. As you know, as someone in the industry, it’s one thing to say I was bad, but I can’t bring down the rest of my wonderful colleagues who worked with me on any film by saying it was bad … that’s my dilemma.”
This was not the first time Hugh Grant had espoused the self-critical nature underpinning his resurgence. This attitude was something he revealed when discussing one of his most iconic moments, the dance scene in Love Actually, where his character, British Prime Minister David, dances through 10 Downing Street to The Pointer Sisters’ classic hit ‘Jump (For My Love)’.
Love Actually, a film by Richard Curtis, the man who gave Grant the three films that saw him typecast as a British heartthrob – Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, and Bridget Jones’s Diary – it is undoubtedly one of the most saccharine junctures in his filmography. In a past interview about the film with Kinowetter, Grant explained his reasons for signing on: “It was a really well-written film; there are few of those around.” However, he did note that the idea for the Pointer Sisters scene caused a “big fight” between him and Curtis, given that the actor did not want to dance.
Later, when speaking as a part of the career retrospective Hugh Grant: A Life on Screen, he looked back on the dance scene again and was more damning than he had originally been. Grant described the dance as “absolute hell” and maintained that the sequence was ad-libbed. Curtis added that Grant had actually practised, with his “dirty behaviour in discos across London”, meaning he was “quite good at dancing”.
Following on from this, co-star Colin Firth recalled that Grant “made a terrible fuss” about the sequence, with the latter conceding that he dreaded shooting it. Grant said he hated it so much that he thought it had the power to be the “most excruciating scene” ever captured.
He concluded: “I thought, ‘That’s going to be excruciating’, and it has the power to be the most excruciating scene ever committed to celluloid.”
