The movie Elizabeth Hurley called a “nightmare” to make: “That was a little tough”
At this point, it is safe to assume that Elizabeth Hurley is either 1) not entirely human or 2) has imbibed some kind of elixir, because she is now 60 and genuinely doesn’t look older than 30, which is even past the Paul Rudd level of not ageing. How she does it, who knows? Perhaps she’s a vampire, although presumably that can be ruled out due to how many selfies she’s in.
Either way, she has been around for a long old while but never looked any different, and for us mere mortals who have to witness the cruel hand of time wipe its claws over our ever-wrinkling cheeks in the bathroom mirror each day, that seems just a little unfair, especially when you consider she also got to be in a film with Austin Powers and one with Wesley Snipes, and got to date Shane Warne and Billy Ray Cyrus too. It’s just a life of ridiculousness.
Because she’s been acting since 1987, and since her debut film Aria, she has racked up quite a few performances in her time, including the Snipes plane thriller Passenger 57 and a fairly poorly received British effort called Mad Dogs and Englishmen in the ‘90s. And it was in 1997 that she found global fame as posh totty Vanessa Kensington in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, which, much as some people think, has aged badly, is in fact probably funnier now than it was then.
Together with her on-off relationship with fellow fop Hugh Grant it put her squarely in Hollywood casting directors’ sites, and in the early 2000s they decided to pair her with the late Friends star Matthew Perry, who was not only one of the world’s biggest comedy names at the time, but also bang in the middle of a period of very heavy substance abuse.
The movie they were to work on was the 2002 romantic comedy Serving Sara, in which Hurley took the role of Perry’s love interest, not that he had much interest in anything other than drugs at that time. The story of the film, as much as there is one, is basically that Perry is one of those people who serve other folk legal papers, and he has to serve some to Hurley’s character, and honestly, who cares about the rest?
As you might imagine, making a movie with someone off their face on narcotics wasn’t a brilliant experience; in fact, production had to be shut down completely while Perry went to rehab for drugs and alcohol abuse.
Hurley, who to her credit does seem to be a nice, smiley sort, had nothing too bad to say about him personally, explaining: “It was tough, obviously he was having a tough time, but he was still very charming and a lovely person to work with, but you could see he was suffering for sure.”
She concluded: “I have very fond memories of him. To be honest, it was a nightmare working with him at that time, and, as it’s now known, our movie was shut down because of his addiction. We were in a force majeure and had to all sit at home twiddling our thumbs for some time.”
