Hugh Grant backs Harry and Meghan amid royal crisis

The British actor didn’t hold back when asked what he thought of Prince Harry and Meghan’s decision to step back as senior royals.

Hugh Grant has weighed in on Megxit and has made it clear he’s on Team Harry/Meghan.

The actor, who has endured his fair share of scandals, told news.com.au about the controversy: “All I will say is that if I was Harry, and my mother had effectively been murdered by the British newspapers, to then watch your wife being taken to pieces by them, I would, like him, be very protective.”

Hugh Grant has backed Prince Harry and Meghan’s decision to step back from the royal family. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

Grant, 59, spoke to news.com.au in Manhattan to promote his latest comedy, The Gentlemen, in which he plays against type as a sleazy private investigator, replete with Cockney accent, who takes scandalous photos of the rich and famous to sell to the tabloids.

Grant has fought and won against British tabloids over defamatory articles written about his private life going back to 1995 and gleefully accepted director Guy Ritchie’s offer to play the kind of man he detests.

“Yeah, it was lovely,” he told news.com.au. “I find myself increasingly drawn and comfortable in revolting roles, the more revolting the better.

“I know some private investigators who have worked for the tabloid press and in fact who hacked my phone and who burgled my flat and stole my medical records,” he said, referring to the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, which came to light in 2011.

Grant is, of course, synonymous with such rom-com fare as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill, Bridget Jones’s Diary and Love Actually, all written by his good friend Richard Curtis.

“Richard always found it hilarious that the public may have thought I was that nice guy I play in his films,” Grant laughed. “He knew very differently. That’s never been me, really, those films, that was a character performance because I am not that Mr Nice Guy.”

On the set of Love Actually: Richard Curtis, Martine McCutcheon and Hugh Grant. Picture: Emma Freud/Twitter

In his personal life, Grant has five offspring with two women. He has a nine-year-old daughter with a former girlfriend, Tinglan Hong.

The following year, in 2012, his son was born to Swedish TV producer Anna Eberstein. He then resumed his relationship with Hong briefly, and she gave birth to his third child, a son, before he reunited with Eberstein, who gave birth to their second child in 2015.

He and Eberstein had another child, in 2018, his fifth, and they married in May 2018, putting his days as an eternal bachelor to rest.

Having come to parenthood relatively late, how is he coping these days?

“I am trying to be a young father in an old man’s body,” he told news.com.au. “It’s rough. I don’t get to go and play golf anymore, and it’s completely knackering.

“If you are 59 and there are five small children in the house, you can’t have a hangover, that’s what I’ve found,” he deadpanned.

He conceded that having children had softened him a little. “Well, it’s very nice. Sometimes people say to me, ‘Well, hang on. You’ve gotten better as an actor in the last 10 years, why?’ And sometimes I think it may be because of the kids. I can do love so well now. It’s touching, isn’t it? I feel opened up and less hide bound.”

Hugh Grant and his wife Anna Eberstein at the 25th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. Picture: Mark Ralston / AFP

With the milestone birthday of 60 looming this year, has Grant considered how he will celebrate?

“I’m going to a clinic in Switzerland called ‘Dignitas’ to end my life,” he said straight-faced. “They do it very gently. Perhaps that’s a little negative but that’s how I plan to celebrate.” (Dignitas is a non profit organisation providing assisted suicide).

Joking aside, Grant continued, “Well, I will probably have a party. I have friends who always make me have a party anyway, my political friends, one in particular, whether I want it or not, just fixes a party. And one of his tricks is to invite people who have done terrible things to me,” he laughed.

“So, he will say, ‘Hugh, here’s Ted. He burgled your flat in 1995’. And I am kind of too polite to say, ‘Get the f**k out’. So I say, ‘Come on in Ted, make yourself at home. I think you know where everything is’,” Grant laughed. “So, I imagine something like that will happen again in September.”

Looking back on some of the hilarious quotes attributed to Grant, who once said on BBC 2, “I was bad at school, I was badly behaved and pretentious”, has he learned to behave differently?

“I’m not sure the bad behaviour has stopped,” he told news.com.au. “I love being pretentious, but I now have a wife who really has zero tolerance for it.

“The thing about having a family is that it’s just damned nice, isn’t it? And you sort of need a family. I get that now.

“I think I had turned into a slightly scary, old, golf-addicted bachelor. I’m glad to see the back of him.”

Charlie Hunnam, Michelle Dockery, Matthew McConaughey, Hugh Grant, and Henry Golding attend a photo call for The Gentlemen. Picture: Slaven Vlasic/Getty Images for STXfilms

The Gentlemen is in cinemas now