Hugh Grant has admitted there’s one film in his oeuvre that he thinks was treated too harshly.
The Bafta winner recently sat down with Variety for an interview about his latest film Heretic, during which he was asked if his decision to stop appearing in romantic comedies was a “conscious choice”.
“I probably would have made that choice anyway, if they had gone on offering them to me. But it just died. I was getting on a bit, let’s face it,” he quipped in typically self-deprecating fashion.
However, Hugh went on to say that his run of romantic comedies ended with one notable “total failure”.
“It was amazing. You know, you go from hero to absolutely zero in the space of a second,” the British performer claimed. “But it’s been quite fun, building it back up slowly and in a new direction.”
Naming the film in question as Did You Hear About The Morgans?, Hugh insisted: “I love it. But unfortunately, it didn’t — what’s the euphemism? It didn’t find the audience it deserved.”
“It was very charming to me,” he added.
Hugh starred opposite Sarah Jessica Parker in the 2009 comedy, in which they played a couple on the brink of divorce who are forced to stay together when they enter into the witness protection programme.
The film was slated by critics upon its release and subsequently bombed at the box office, with Hugh admitting last year that he felt “marooned” in his career around this period.
He has since credited the epic Cloud Atlas – in which he played several different characters from numerous cultures and time periods – with setting his acting career in a different direction.
In the decade since, Hugh has entered what he’s affectionately called the “freak show era” of his career, playing everything from a right-leaning historian in Netflix’s Death To… series and Tony The Tiger in Unfrosted to a thespian with a vendetta in Paddington 2 and a sinister homebody obsessed with games in his latest movie.
Oh, and, who could forget his outing as a surly Oompa Loompa in the 2022 screen musical Wonka?