The one movie Hugh Grant will always refuse to talk about: “I ruined it, and it was my fault”
Having settled comfortably into his groove as a miserable git, Hugh Grant has quietly enjoyed a renaissance, which has also coincided with the actor trashing the majority of his most famous films.
In his defence, his retrospective criticisms aren’t entirely limited to the breakthrough period in the 1990s when he became one of the United Kingdom’s biggest Hollywood exports, cornering the market on awkward, foppish charm and steering several rom-coms to box office success.
Even though he agreed to play the role and was presumably paid handsomely for his troubles, Grant wasn’t overly enthused by playing an Oompa Loompa in Paul King’s Wonka, saying he “couldn’t have hated the whole thing more” after spending the entire shoot as a CGI-assisted version of himself.
He also admitted that he made a “catastrophic mistake” in playing up his Four Weddings and a Funeral persona in public, insisting that it was all an act he was putting on for the American cameras, which led to him being typecast as someone he only pretended to be for the benefit of an audience, which was his own fault.
There are several other films that the Golden Globe winner has openly denigrated, but there’s only one that he refuses to talk about. Why? Because he’s adamant that he single-handedly ruined it. During a career retrospective with SAG-AFTRA, which should have been his first clue that it was going to come up eventually, Grant tried his hardest to breeze past 1995’s Nine Months as quickly as possible.
When asked about his first post-Four Weddings picture, things got awkward. “Well, I don’t talk about that film,” he stated. “I might have been on a lot of drugs during that one, too. You would have had to be on an awful lot of drugs. They were really nice people, terrific filmmakers, and they’ve made lovely films. I ruined it.”
Chris Columbus’ remake of the French film of the same name stars Grant as a reformed womaniser and child psychologist, who’s forced to wrestle with his commitment issues when his girlfriend falls pregnant. She leaves him, he realises he wants to spend the rest of his life with her, and comedic hijinks ensue.
“I really ruined it,” he doubled down. “And it was entirely my fault. I panicked. It was such a big jump up from what I’d been paid before to what they were offering me, and the scale was inhuman to my standards. And I just tried much too hard, and I forgot to do the basic acting things, like mean it.”
Summarising both his self-assessment and his feelings on Nine Months as a whole, Grant quickly wrapped up this section of a career-spanning trip down memory lane by concluding, “I pulled faces, and I overacted, and it was a shocker. Move on.” It’s been 30 years, and clearly, his performance still haunts him.
