The movie Hugh Grant regrets making: “Catastrophic mistake”
Hugh Grant’s career is looking pretty great at the moment. After about 15 years of playing the leading heartthrob in romantic comedies and another decade of doing not much acting at all, he’s started giving audiences something they never knew they needed: a liberated Hugh Grant.
It all started with Florence Foster Jenkins in 2016. In it, he played the manager and companion to the titular socialite (Meryl Streep), who dreams of becoming an opera singer despite having a terrible voice. He earned rave reviews for his nuanced, surprisingly restrained performance and has been something of a critical darling ever since. A Very English Scandal, Paddington 2, Heretic, and Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy have all showcased his hitherto unknown depths as an actor. In fact, he has been such a standout part of all of his films since 2016 that he is usually the best thing about them.
All of this came as quite a surprise, even for Grant’s most ardent fans. As a rom-com star, he was perfect – handsome, charmingly self-deprecating, and possessing perfect comic timing. His whole blinking, stammering schtick made him sufficiently non-threatening to make a happily-ever-after ending seem plausible, and even when he played genuinely terrible people (his character in Nine Months being the obvious example), he still managed to charm his way out of it.
Grant built his entire career and stardom off of this routine, and it seemed pretty genuine. But according to him, it was a complete accident, and one he bitterly regrets. During an interview with Vanity Fair in 2024, the actor revealed that after the success of his performances in Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral in 1994, he felt that he had to be that character off camera as well, even if it didn’t resonate with him at all.
“The irony of the Richard Curtis parts I played is that they were actually character roles for me—I’m not that stutter-y, blink-y guy,” he said. “The catastrophic mistake I made was that because Four Weddings was such a gigantic success, I thought, ‘Oh well, this is the way of infinite wealth and success. People are eating up that person.’ So I did him in real life.”
He revealed that he started doing interviews in character as if he was still that bashful Brit in Four Weddings. During his Golden Globes acceptance speech, he remembers saying things like “gosh” and “I love you,” a moment that still makes him cringe. “What a dick” is his precise summation of that version of himself. No matter what anyone thought of that routine, however, Grant is clear: “It was never me at all.”
It’s possible that as a movie-going public, we are now more receptive to this type of revelation than at any other point. With celebrities on social media and every person with a phone becoming a member of the paparazzi, it makes it a lot harder for famous people to maintain a constructed persona. And on balance, wouldn’t we all rather imagine that the ‘real’ Hugh Grant is the one dancing and singing in prisoner garb than the one who runs around in traffic trying to catch Julia Roberts?
