Hugh Grant on quitting rom-coms, fatherhood and his new dark drama with ‘silly’ Nicole Kidman
Hugh Grant says he’s relieved to be too ‘old and ugly’ for romantic comedies these days and reveals why he’s relishing his dark side in the new drama The Undoing
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Once a quintessential rom-com king, Hugh Grant is enjoying a career renaissance he still can’t quite believe — but he’ll take it.
Successfully sidestepping the floppy-haired, “nice guy” persona he embodied in popular movies, Love Actually and Notting Hill, the famously sardonic Brit has carved a new path entirely — as an acclaimed dramatic actor.
His serious breakthrough came as disgraced Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe in 2018’s A Very English Scandal, which scooped Golden Globe, Emmy, BAFTA and Screen Actors Guild award nominations to boot.
Last year he almost stole the show again, from his big name co-stars including Matthew McConaughey, Michelle Dockery, Colin Farrell, Charlie Hunnam and Succession’s Jeremy Strong, as a shady cockney private investigator in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen.
Now, in the dark HBO thriller, The Undoing, he’s a paediatric oncologist, opposite his therapist wife, in Nicole Kidman — and proves his professional reinvention is certainly no fluke. Naturally, in best Grant tradition, he’s ready with a self-effacing quip. “I just got too old and ugly for romantic comedies,” deadpans the 60-year-old. “So, I didn’t exactly choose it, it chose me. And thank God. Since then, I’ve almost been enjoying acting,” he smiles. “I haven’t done a rom-com since The Rewrite, which was years ago [2014].”
He initially made his name in the ’90s, soaring to stardom in Richard Curtis’s Four Weddings and a Funeral, which garnered him a BAFTA and a Golden Globe for Best Actor. An indelible part of the equally successful Curtis stable, Grant went on to grace four more of the prolific writer-director’s projects — Notting Hill (1999), Love Actually (2003), and the first two films in the beloved Bridget Jones franchise (2001, 2004).
Though his stocks rose rapidly over that period, Grant wasn’t so thrilled behind the scenes. “The part I played in those movies was a character role for me. I’m not that person,” he insists. “That person is Richard Curtis, who wrote himself. I found it both amusing and sometimes exasperating that people thought, ‘That’s Hugh’. It wasn’t at all. I’m much closer to the character in Bridget Jones, or perhaps About a Boy [2002].
By a decade later, he had expanded his portfolio considerably, tackling the likes of Cloud Atlas (2012), Florence Foster Jenkins (2016) and Paddington 2 (2017), in which he proved an irresistibly winning villain.
Now in The Undoing, he faces a challenge of a different kind.
“I used to say, ‘If you want deep and dark, get Ray Fiennes,’ ” he smiles, not looking very dark at all. “And this is pretty deep and dark so it was fun to have a go at that.”
He pauses: “But look, I am proud of most of those romantic comedies because they worked, they entertained people, and they’re not idiotic.” He quickly corrects himself. “Well, the vast majority of them are not idiotic, so I’m not going to diss them, but certainly I’ve done enough of them and I’m glad I’m not doing them anymore.”
The Undoing is based on the 2014 best-selling novel by Jean Hanff Korelitz and is directed by The Night Manager’s Suzanne Bier.
Grant embraced playing one of his most flawed characters yet: “yes, the more complex it is, the better.”
He also relished playing husband to Kidman.
“Well, I was slightly intimidated because she’s a great actress. It was a bit like when I did that film with Meryl Streep [Florence Foster Jenkins] but then I realised, ‘Oh, these girls know what they’re doing’. And I knew Nicole a little bit because we once had a dinner in the ’90s.” He quickly realises the get-together sounds like it might have been a date, and explains it was anything but. “No, no, it was a big dinner, lots of people and her with her husband [Tom Cruise] and me with my then-girlfriend [Elizabeth Hurley]. Nicole’s sister was there as well. At heart, Nicole is a silly Aussie girl with a great sense of humour, so we were absolutely fine.”
But it’s not only his career that has evolved in recent years — his former longstanding status as a resolute bachelor also went the way of his past rom-com career.
Now he’s a husband and father of five children between the ages of two and eight, though his romantic life proved so complicated that two of his girlfriends were pregnant at the same time. Swedish TV producer Anna Eberstein, mother of three of his offspring, scored the wedding ring. The other children are the product of his relationship with Tinglan Hong.
“Anyone with young children would probably say the same thing: it’s simultaneously the worst time in your life and the best,” he notes, an undeniable twinkle in his eye.
“Day to day, as you tread on another broken toy with a hangover, it’s just awful. But when you look back at your photographs through your iPhone you realise and see, ‘Oh. I have been extremely happy, this is very nice.’ It’s very odd.”
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What sort of father is he? “Well, you turn into your own father. You don’t even realise you’re doing it, but you do. I bark in exactly the same way he barks at me,” Grant laughs. “And there are other things. Now I make a ridiculous grimace when I’m doing very easy tasks, like taking off the top of a bottle. He’s always done that and I am doing it now too. I am turning into him. But as a father, stylistically, I am probably a little bit more like my mother. She was quite silly with us as children, lots of silly voices, and I do that with my children. I’m not sure if they even enjoy it — they roll their eyes half the time.”
As for school obligations, he says, “In my day, the parents went maybe once a term. Now you can’t keep them out of the schools, there’s more parents than teachers in these schools. And the endless emails about things like, ‘Tomorrow is a dress as a frog day.’”
He rolls his eyes: “And it’s the parents who come in dressed as frogs. I mean, come on everyone! Pull yourself together!”
He is whip smart and endlessly amusing when asked about hitting 60. “Well, I don’t relish being dead, and I think it’s going to be dull to be honest. ”
The Undoing streams on BINGE from Monday
Originally published as Hugh Grant on quitting rom-coms, fatherhood and his new dark drama with ‘silly’ Nicole Kidman