Hugh Grant is getting reflective about his time in the spotlight.
In a wide-ranging new interview with Vanity Fair about his acting career, the Bafta winner admitted that he began growing tired of playing such similar roles in romantic comedies in the 1990s and early 2000s, particularly when the persona began spilling over into his real life.
“The irony of the Richard Curtis parts I played is that they were actually character roles for me,” he explained. “I’m not that stutter-y, blink-y guy.”
Hugh continued: “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: I started doing interviews [in that style]. In my Golden Globe acceptance speech from 1995, I said, ‘I love you, gosh, blah blah. Thank you so much’ – what a dick.”
“It was never me at all,” he insisted. “People quite rightly were repelled by it in the end.”
By the end of this era, Hugh remembered feeling “completely marooned”, until the Wachowskis approached him about appearing in Cloud Atlas.
“I was probably only offered that because some of their international distributors had said, ‘We need some more recognisable names. Cram someone recognisable in here’,” he remarked, insisting that while the directors “will deny that”, he’s convinced it’s “partly what happened”.
Regardless of how he wound up with the role, playing so many roles in the surreal fantasy movie helped Hugh come to a realisation that he “used to really enjoy doing characters – in fact, I almost used to enjoy acting”.
“I started out doing silly voices, odd people, making people laugh at university, and then doing this comedy show in London. It was doing characters,” he recalled.
“Then through sheer chance, maybe because of the way I looked, I got drawn into the leading romantic hero. It went fine, but it’s not what I think I’m best at – partly because it’s less fun.”
Since Cloud Atlas, Hugh has been able to tap into a variety of different roles and genres, from big-budget fantasy in Dungeons And Dragons and gritty gangster territory in Guy Ritchie’s The Gentlemen to family-friendly villainousness in Paddington 2 and, of course, playing an Oompa Loompa in Wonka.
For his next role, he’s tapping into something else entirely, portraying a truly sinister figure in the A24 horror Heretic.
In fact, Heretic’s directors Scott Beck and Bryan Woods first considered Hugh for their project after watching him shape-shifting in Cloud Atlas.
So far, the British actor has received rave reviews for his performance in the movie, which precedes him reprising the role of Daniel Cleaver in the next Bridget Jones film.
Read Hugh Grant’s full interview in Vanity Fair here.