Hugh Grant is back, and better than ever. Just don’t make him hang about with actors…!
Hugh Grant is a master of self-deprecation, but he’s been so insistent for so long now about his general grumpiness that it’s difficult to believe that he’s not also being brutally honest about his true nature. Ask him what things make him grumpy and he sighs, “Well, everything. It’s almost shorter to tell you what doesn’t. Everything makes me grumpy.”
Like a bad day at golf? “Well, obviously that,” says Hugh. “But just the tiniest things – someone walking too slowly in front of me, waiting in a post office queue behind elderly people.
“I mean, the pensioners – I want to hurl them to the floor and out of the way, one by one. I admit it, shamefully – I have become very impatient.”
Grant, now 64, has never been someone to mince his words. The dreamy, sloped eyed, foppish heartthrob from Four Weddings, Notting Hill, About a Boy, Sense and Sensibility, Bridget Jones and Love Actually had previously earned himself a caustic reputation, especially when it comes to dealings with the press.
In the years following his 2011 essay in The New Statesman titled, The Bugger, Bugged, he became obsessed with battling press intrusion, at the same time temporarily calling time on his acting career, claiming he was in retirement. Yet he hasn’t quite kept to his word.
“I always feel like I’m in permanent semi-retirement, before occasionally something lures me back, and that’s really fun, something I want to do which is a break from the norm.
“Certainly, Bridget Jones is one of those roles that just feels like the right thing at the right time,” he says, referencing his impressive return as Daniel Cleaver in the Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, following on from last year’s superb Heretic.
Perhaps what keeps Grant going is the fact he has a clutch of children these days to impress… five, to be exact.
“I enjoy fatherhood, immensely,” he says. “For years, I was always brayed at: ‘Hugh, you must get some kids, it will change your life’, and I’d say, ‘Oh shut up, I don’t want to hear this, I’m perfectly happy as I am’.
“But no, I stand corrected, it’s something I couldn’t have expected to enjoy as much as I do.”
As for what else keeps the actor so effortlessly young… “Exercise in the morning, a run or a brisk walk. Music tends to calm me down, as does refusing to associate with the acting fraternity as soon as the cameras stop rolling.
“I still see old school friends from Oxford, but as for actors… no thanks!”
