If Nicole Kidman can be considered not “well-known” or “talented” enough to star alongside Hugh Grant in Notting Hill, it shouldn’t shock us that studios had some choice comments for his other co-stars too.
Still, the news that Emma Thompson ― who is a mere year older than Hugh ― was considered “too old” to play his love interest is pretty disappointing.
Speaking to Yahoo Movies UK back in 2018, the Love, Actually star said “age gap casting,” where women often play the on-screen beaus of older men, is “extraordinary”.
“I remember listening to people say Hugh Grant was too young for me in Sense And Sensibility when I was 35 and he was 34,” she said.
“You just go, ‘Okay, this is really endemic, really deep, deep, deep in our culture.’ So it has to change.”
Emma, who was 60 at the time of the Yahoo Movies interview, joked: “They’re going to have to exhume someone to play opposite me. That’s the gag.”
The Remains Of The Day actor, who has since turned the tables when it comes to age-gap romance in her film Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, continued: “The more we can show actual relationships, so women with younger men, the better. Absolutely. Let’s get on with it!”
In another interview, Emma explained that her co-star was “so cross” with her Sense And Sensibility acting style.
Speaking to the New Yorker, she explained that she was really letting her tears loose in the scene where she realises Edward Ferrars (Hugh’s character) has not, in fact, gotten married.
She had written in her diary: “I was trying to make it as involuntary as possible. A case of the diaphragm taking over.”
“Hugh Grant was so cross,” she shared.
“He said, ‘You’re going to cry all the way through my speech?’ I said, ‘Hugh, I’ve got to. That’s the gag. It’s funny.’ And he says, ‘Yeah, but I’m speaking.’ I said, ‘I know.’”
Apparently the Four Weddings And A Funeral actor wasn’t prepared for how their later film, Love, Actually, turned out either.
“I remember him walking out behind me after we saw the premiere and saying, ’I don’t know about you, but that’s the most psychotic thing I’ve ever appeared in,” Emma told an entertainment reporter during a red carpet interview.
“We had no idea people would become so fond of it.”